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 c,ompanies 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!

I stumbled across Michelle Bowles “5 Top Email Marketing Tactics for 2010″  blog and had to share it with everyone! The blog discusses 5 tactics that will help any company’s email marketing efforts. If you are familiar with this blog, these tactics may seem familiar to you. In May 2009, we published a blog about Roadrunner’s social media pioneering. They are an excellent example of  a company that has utilized social media and email integration, as well as launching a full re-engagement strategy. (For more neat ways that our clients pioneer and utilize email marketing best practices, you should check out our video “Five Clients in Five Minutes”)

Bowles’s blog offers 5 ways to improve your email marketing:

1. Integrating Email With Social Media

-Using a blog to highlight content from an e-newsletter once or twice a month, inviting readers to download the full content via a landing page. Which reminds me, click on the blog homepage to get the full “Is Email Endangered?” white paper.

- Leveraging social media to offer different ways to interact with the subscriber– twitter feed promotions, rss feeds and a monthly newsletter

2. Focusing on Engaging Subscribers

-Personalize subject lines

-Incentivize click-throughs

-Make it as easy as possible for an email to be shared on social networks and forwarded

3. Re-engaging Inactive Subscribers

-Incentivize and create reasons to open the email ex, free trials or whitepapers

-create sense of urgency around an ending subscription

-segment inactive subscribers and cut back on the frequency of communications

4. Creating Viral Campaigns

-Instead of generic terms like “forward to a friend”, tailor them to a specific email/campaign (Ex. “Forward these tips for building credit to a colleague”)

-Make content available to everyone and easy to forward

-Vary the placement of share this links

5. A/B Testing and Optimizing Landing Pages

-Use this testing to find out the best response and layout for an email

I highly recommend that you read this article and utilize these tactics! We have found these techniques invaluable.