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Email Marketing Guide 4: Testing & learning

2. What to test in email marketing

With email marketing you can measure effectively who opened your email and what links they clicked on. This information will help you to continually improve your email marketing communications and improve the success of your campaigns.

• Subject line - The subject line helps get your email opened and is a very important aspect of email marketing communications. If your company has the ability to segment, consider making the subject line relevant to a segmented list - which is key to getting opened.

  Related article: OPEN SESAME: Creating your email marketing subject line

• From - This is something that should be tested very early on. In general the "from" is used by marketers to establish exactly WHO this email is coming from - and recipients have come to expect that as well. This is a decision your company should make: is it the brand, the company, the name of the email newsletter, or the name of an individual? It should definitely be a company or brand name, not an email address, generic department or unfamiliar person's name. Also, the actual email address used should include the company or brand name, not a generic address such as reply@companyname.co.uk - which can trigger spam filters.

• Call to action - Testing this is imperative. Because of its importance the call to action has been given its own section.

  Related article: Does your email marketing inspire action?

• Layout - The layout, look, style, fonts and even colours can give a professional sheen to email marketing communications and reinforces your brand. Test all aspects of these to see if they could perform better. If over several issues you find that articles and topics in the mailings are not performing well - i.e. not getting clicks of significant numbers, test the location in the layout or have a different style synopsis to the article.

• Copy length - Here's an interesting area to test. Though brevity is important in this day and age of scanning the inbox, studies are finding that long copy can indeed perform as well as short copy. You may get fewer clicks but more conversion (more intensely interested then just generally interested).

  Related article: How much content should I have in my email marketing?

• Time, day, frequency - If you go by industry 'standards', the best days to send are Tues/Wed morning for B2B and Fri/Sat for B2C. But this may not suit your database at all. Testing is how you will assess what your readers respond best to. There are some practical mail times, such as sports and travel at the weekends, and business information during the week - otherwise it really is up to you to test and find out.

  Related article: When to send my email marketing?

Areas covered in this guide

• Introduction
• > What to test in email marketing
• How to Test
• Analysing and Learning