Testing Email Marketing Campaigns – The A/B Split Test
We have just scheduled an email campaign to go to over 63,000 customers for one client and thought that I would share with you the importance of something we have set up in this campaign – A/B Split Testing.
With all marketing tools it is so important to test the activity that you are doing and then respond to the results in the right way. It it worked, think about doing it again. If you have tried it a number of times and you got nothing from it… re-think what you are doing, or consider it to be a non-effective way of marketing your product AND STOP. Ineffective marketing is just like purring money down the drain.
The very nature of online marketing makes it easier to measure and test any marketing or communications activity. Tools such as Google Analytics help you to see the volume of traffic (the people) coming to your site, where they came from and how long the stayed. Even right through to purchase or showing you the most popular content on your site.
Our BeyondMail email marketing system is another tool that allows you to measure and test the effectiveness of your email marketing.
Not only can you gauge the level traffic that is coming to your site from any email that you may send out, right down to who clicked what and when, it also enables you to test and refine your campaigns to develop them into more profitable ways of marketing online.
A/B split testing essentially measures the results from things such as different subject lines, different email content and also different from addresses. All of these three items will have different impact on the success of your email marketing campaign.
With the client mentioned above, we have scheduled the campaign to send the same content, but to use two different subject lines.
Subject Line A will be sent to 12,000 customers, Subject Line B will be sent to 12,000 customers.
Which ever produces the highest open rate in a 4 hour period will be declared the winner and will then be sent on to the remaining 39,000 customers.
Why do this?
From the initial split test we will see which subject line was more effective in encouraging subscribers to open the email. If one proved more popular than the other, then we would be able to then send the one that worked the best to the remaining list of customers. This will maximise the potential of a greater return for this email campaign.
If you would like more information on how you can also test email marketing campaigns that you may be about to send out – contact toinfinity on 01793 238697 or email us here.
Phishing Concerns in Email Marketing
A definition from Wikipedia. Phishing: In the field of computer security, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.
It now affects your email marketing
In a promising move, some email clients are building phishing detection right into the software itself. I’m sure that like me, most of you have received a few PayPal or the Bank phishing scams in your time.
Phishing scam detection as now been added to both Mozilla Thunderbird and AOL 9.0 – and more to follow I am sure.
This will impact on how you or your marketing agency design your email creative.
So how do they know If you are a phishing scam or not?
The email client you use to read your emails will look for a link in your campaign where the display text is a URL (such as www.toinfinity.co.uk). If the displayed link is different from the actual URL, the user is alerted that it may be a phishing scam.
The problem
Most email marketing software providers change every link in the code of your campaigns so that they can track link clicks for you. This means that even when you have a link like:
It is changed to something like:
This change will mean that your email may get flagged as a phishing scam.
The solution
Avoid using a URL as the display text for a link in any HTML emails. Use a word or phrase which describes the link itself. Such as:
Even though it will be changed by your email marketing provider to look like this:
You won’t ever be identified as a potential phishing scammer.
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