Email Marketing Optimization

Jim Pugh

Overview

• Producing strong emails

• Maintaining a healthy email list

• Using testing to optimize your program

• Email testing simulation

Producing Strong Emails

What's the goal of your email marketing program?

• Well, that depends on your organization or company

• BUT... we all want email recipients to take some action

• How do we make that happen?

Writing Best Practices

• Keep it short

• Tell a story – problem and solution

• Be timely

Writing Best Practices

• Have a clear ask

• Everyone needs an editor and checklister

• Subscribe to email lists (good and bad)

The Paradox of Choice

• People have a hard time making decisions

• More than one ask in the email means more work for readers

• Cost of indecision outweighs benefit of more choices

The Paradox of Choice

• Non-profit example: “RSVP for an event near you” vs. “RSVP for THIS event near you”

– Tested with the Obama email list 100% increase in signup rate for single event

• For-profit example: “Get a discounted trip to Ibiza, Cancun, or the Bahamas” vs. “Get a discounted trip to Ibiza”

Personalizing Your Emails

• Mass emails often come across as impersonal

• Can connect more with readers by personalizing

• Examples: Name in salutation (“Jim –”), city in subject line (“Events in San Francisco”)

Maintaining a Healthy Email List

What’s a “healthy” email list?

• Healthy email lists are active and growing

• You will lose people on your list over time – and that’s ok– In non-profit space, average “churn” rate is 19% per

year

• To have a healthy list, you need to:– Get new people on your list

– Avoid losing the wrong people from your list

Growing Your List

• Very organization/company dependent

• Common approaches:– Website signups/purchases– Social media– Online advertising– Recruit-a-friend promotions– Shareable content

• Buying email addresses is a bad idea

Keep The Right People On Your List

• Anytime you send an email, people will unsubscribe – cost of doing business

• BUT, some emails will turn off more people than others

• Pay attention to unsubscribe rates

Ways to Decrease Unsubscribes

• Be honest with your subject lines

• Don’t email too often (ideally, at most once every two days) – this will also increase action rates

• Segmentation

Segmentation

• Not everyone needs to receive every email you send

• Emails should be targeted to people who are likely to take action

• Benefits: Higher action rates, lower unsubscribe rates, lower email frequency

Segmentation

• Example: Amazon.com offering new season of Game of Thrones on DVD People who purchased the previous season or the books

• Example: Obama campaign offering new Earth Day merchandise in their online store People who have listed the environment as an issue they care about

Segmentation Categories

• Action history, action history, action history

• Issue interest

• Geography

• Language, gender, age, email domain, …

Using Testing toOptimize Your Program

Why test?

• People are very bad at predicting what makes the most compelling email

• Often have several different seemingly good ideas – instead of guessing which is best, we can measure it

• Lets you customize your program to work best for your specific email list

A Brief Metrics Refresher

• Open rate: opens / recipients

• Click rate: clicks / recipients

• Action rate: actions / recipients

• Unsubscribe rate: unsubscribes / recipients

A Brief Metrics Refresher

• Open rate: opens / recipients

• Click rate: clicks / recipients

• Action rate: actions / recipients

• Unsubscribe rate: unsubscribes / recipients

A/B Testing

• Compare performance of two (or more) different email drafts

• Process:– Identify two randomly-selected “test” groups from

your full email list (2,000 people or more each)

– Send email A to one group and email B to the other

– Look at the response metrics to determine which performed better

– Send the better email to the remainder of the list

A/B Testing

• Example: Same fundraising email draft, two different subject lines– Email A subject line about puppies, email B subject line

about cats

– Full list of 100,000 emails; select 10,000 randomly for A,

10,000 randomly for B

– Send emails, and measure results:

• 1,276 open A and 1,403 open B

• 267 donate to A, 195 donate to B

– Which do you choose?

Subject Line Testing

• Lowest hanging fruit – A/B testing with subject lines

• Think of two to four good subject lines for your draft

• Test our different subjects, then send remainder with the best one

• Common to see 15%+ improvements from tests

Content Testing

• Can test more than subject lines – different email body copy

• Use same approach: run test, then send best version to remainder

• Requires more work than subject line testing, but can give bigger improvements (50%+)

Statistical Significance

• Higher test performance doesn’t always mean better – needs to be statistically significant

• Make sure email test groups large enough for significance

• http://rebuildthedream.com/calculator.xls

Best Practice Testing

• Your email list is unique – different practices will work better or worse than with other lists

• As a result, few universal best practices

• Subject line and content testing useful for single email sends, but not for learning best practices

Best Practice Categories

• Sender

• Email visual design

• Content structure

• Landing page

How to Run a Best Practice Test

• Use full list for A/B test groups – no remainder

• Use a higher statistical significance threshold (98% or 99%, instead of 95%) – may need to run multiple tests to achieve

• Repeat test in different contexts to make sure results are generalizable

How to Run a Best Practice Test

• Example: Sending emails from “Barack Obama” vs. “President Barack Obama”

– Split email list into two, randomly-selected 50% groups

– Tested for fundraiser, sign-on letter, letter-to-the-editor campaign

– Consistently saw stronger performance from “Barack Obama” with 99% confidence

Used “Barack Obama” as new best practice

Questions BeforeEmail Testing Simulation?

Email Testing Simulation

• http://rebuildthedream.com/ga-training/

• Choice of two campaigns:– Obama campaign fundraiser

– “BeingSocial” discount offer

• Three different drafts, four subject lines each

• Use provided Email Tester to run A/B tests to determine the best draft/subject combination

• Pay attention to statistical significance

• Note down why you made the decisions you did

Questions?