We are marketers. We are concerned with relevant creative campaigns, as well as driving ROI and specific to email marketing, improving our click through rate. Here at FanMail, we always stress the significance of A/B testing important email campaigns. Testing can accurately show which version of the same email campaign is more successful in all three of these categories: design, ROI and increased click-through rates. Marketing Experiments and our partner ExactTarget ran a study and published a whitepaper two weeks ago titled, ” Maximize your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain”  which offers some great insight on testing ones email marketing campaigns.

They found from testing 3 companies email campaigns: AAA, Marketing Experiments and Pier One Imports , that design is way more than just following best practices, it is also about testing. They noted an increase in interactive market testing (from Forrester)  and offered many reasons why this increase in budget is necessary for ROI.

Here is what they found: They took three companies and asked 3 marketing agencies to redesign each companies email campaign to improve click-through rates. Each company now had 3 or 4 emails to compare to the control email they submitted for the study. They found a few surprising conclusions, after looking at the first email campaign for AAA they found that the email using “best practices” fell short to the email using a radical horizontal design. Don’t throw your best practices out of the window yet, this just means know the rules and know when to break the rules a little. Testing can show if you are breaking the rules in a good way.

In the second test using the Marketing Experiments email, they found that the email which added more graphics and less copy prevailed their tried and true template. The experiment offers this conclusion that “new” can be better. It shows that even a vigorously tested and successful email campaign needs to be updated once in a while. It leads clients to believe, ” your company is continually advancing, working and thriving”.

The third email test of Pier 1 Imports provided some interesting results! One email redesign DECREASED the click- through rate by 52%. Holy Crap… I hope you are testing your campaigns. That is ROI your company could be missing out on! So test your campaigns and start your campaigns with ROI in mind: what do you what this campaign to accomplish? Once you set a campaign goal you can easily measure your goals and test different email designs.

Check out this whitepaper for more tricks and tips. It has a wealth of information!