Category: Email Marketing

Posted in Digital Marketing, Email Marketing

Top 5 Email Marketing Best Practices for A/B Testing

Posted on by gmfrem

A/B Split Testing

In case you are not a digital or email marketing specialist – A/B testing also known as split testing, compares two versions of the same campaign on a certain channel. These channels include, but are not limited to:

  • Website
  • Social Media
  • Emails
  • Mobile Apps
  • Landing Pages
  • Digital Advertisements

In reality, A/B testing increases customer engagement, improves campaign effectiveness, and enlightens marketers about audience preferences. By evaluating the behaviours of buyers, A/B testing reveals what truly appeals to them. In doing so, it also advances consumer engagement, campaign effectiveness and marketer expertise.

Here are the 5 top best practices for testing and improving your email marketing strategy:

  1. Keep it simple. Testing simple elements like subject lines, from first name/last name and email copy. It is less time consuming testing these and being creative with simple test is the way forward for success.
  2. Standardise email send times. When running any split test, be sure to normalise your email broadcast times. Changes in the timing of just 30 minutes can significantly change the results of your test. Therefore, making sure email is broadcast together at an optimal time for your audience is key.
  3. Pick your sample sizes wisely. If your sample size is not significant enough, you may end up choosing a winner without actually having one. By best practice, it’s advisable to have at least 1,000 observations for any test. For example, when running a subject line test, you need at least 1,000 opens per email to get the statistical significance. If you can’t find significance, you would need to run the test again and aggregate the data.
  4. Best to test one element at a time. As a good rule of thumb, testing one variable at a time is the best way to go unlike having the thought that testing various elements would have more impact and to drive improvement. This is a big No No! By testing one variable at a time, measuring the results, and rolling out the winners into your new emails over time is the best way to driving improvement in your email marketing strategy.
  5. Check your test results. There are likely to be some test results that makes no sense at all. The finest, most engaging email might not be the cutest or your favourite but trust the data and your email results will be awesome!

I hope this blog has helped give you some split testing ideas as well as a foundation for how to test and measure your email results.

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Posted in Digital Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing

6 Proven Tactics to Adopt to Increase Your Email Open Rate in 2017

Posted on by gmfrem

Email marketing has evolved rapidly alongside the technological growth that has occurred throughout the 21st century. Email marketing specialist in various organisations spend a lot of time thinking about how to increase their email open rates during campaigns.

After broadcasting every email you send, you eagerly check your reports and take a look at your open rate results. Have they improved or worsen? Do some of your customers open your emails more than others? Was your subject line the best it could be for that campaign? These are the major post-mortem marketers normally engage in after dispatching an email campaign.

Data driven marketing has come to stay with most modern email software’s providing business intelligence /analytic’s from device used to access the email, which email domain produced best open rate etc.

Below are 6 proven best practice steps to follow to improve email open rate this year:

1. Keep your customer engaged and offer them something of value

Whenever your customers have the impression your brand send them interesting, engaging emails, open rates will definitely be high. If you are sending information that doesn’t resonate, it promotional all the time – customers send your emails to junk or unsubscribe. Sending high-quality email less frequently is one of the best ways to keep open rates high.

customer-enagement-email-open-blog2. Use mobile responsive email templates

If your brand’s email messages don’t read well on mobile devices, then you’re in trouble. It is estimated that 74 percent of smartphone owners use their phone to access their emails, and mobile now represents 51 percent of all email opens. When your emails display well on mobile, you will see an improvement in your open rates, in addition to enjoying higher engagement and more clicks.

3. Make sure your contact list is up to date

How often do email specialist/marketers go through their contact database to make sure email address issues are resolved? When was the last time you sent out an “update profile form” to make sure you are targeting and reaching the right audience with the most up to date email address?

According to Constant Contact, email address domains like Comcast and Verizon tend to have higher open rates compared to account from Hotmail and Yahoo. Finding the time to get your contact database organised and looking at  opportunities to resolve any issues on hard and soft bounces are quiet crucial to keeping your list updated and working towards a higher open rate for your email campaigns.

 4. Segment your mailing list

Segmenting your email database based on audience interest and behaviour is one of the most effective ways to increase your open rate and ROI in email marketing. Campaigns sent to customers with more personalised content is likely to result in good open rates on average.

email-segmentation-blog

The whole point of segmentation is to provide more relevant content to your email recipients at all times of the buying cycle. To achieve this, you would need to take steps to craft more targeted campaigns taking into account your database list based on (geography, age, gender, persona, organisation type,  job function, industry, level of education,  purchase interest, buying frequency, purchase history etc.) and also lead data, and trigger events that help customize your email campaigns further.

5. Adoption of real-time personalisation

email-personalisation

Using first or last name approach to get attention and a good open rate is no longer the best work to keep your customers engaged anymore. To get the best from email personalisation, much emphasis needs to be placed on real-time marketing. That is being customer centric and making the customer centre of every touch point. With brands understanding their prospect/customer needs, place, situation and daily habits, content can be tailored in the best possible way during the day, week or month to get the best value and engagement from your customers.

An email recipient receiving a marketing promotion content at the right moment is likely to be engaged and take the right call to action rather that generic content  that is not tailored to the customers past behaviour.

 6. Data driven marketing is key going forward

According to the Direct marketing association 42% of email specialist think data was their biggest obstacle  to personalised emails and therefore as essential for marketers to really get that business intelligence and strategy right. Data-driven marketing refers to the marketing insights and decisions that arise from the analysis of data about or from consumers. This is in plain terms, the principle of delivering a personalised customer experience with the intelligence from a customer point of view of a brand.

data-driven-marketing-gmfrem

Therefore, brands that are really taking advantage of data and working collaboratively with their teams to deliver insightful and relevant product/service to the customer in real time get the best engagement and valuable result for their brand.

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