With summer approaching, businesses opening back up and the high street starting to come back to life, there’s an appetite for experiences again, which means consumers are looking to buy and explore what’s available to them.
One of the best ways to quickly get infront of your customers and tell them what’s new is an email marketing campaign. It’s a method that still consistently delivers one of the best returns on your marketing investment. But how can you make sure your emails are connecting with customers and keeping them engaged?
Effective testing is one of the best ways to do this, so how do you start?
What are you Testing?
First of all, you need to work out what your hypothesis is. What are you trying to improve and what are you going to change in order to test it? Having a clear reason set out for testing allows you to have more clarity about whether you’re finding out anything new. The more specific the better, so for example, if you want to change the CTA visual that tries to get people to do something in your emails then have a focus on why that is – you’re going to make it brighter and bigger, because you think you’ll get a better Click through rate.
You’re setting out the parameters and making it clear what you expect to happen and what you’re measuring.
What are you Measuring?
Having your metrics set out so you can clearly define why you’re carrying testing out is important:
- Opens
- Clicks
- Click-to-open
- Conversion rate
- Average order value
- Total revenue
- Return of investment
These are just some of the metrics you can use to monitor whether your tests are working. Are you looking at clicks or conversions? If more revenue is your end goal, then conversions are what you need to look at.
Test Times
Your testing can’t go on forever, otherwise you won’t be able to measure any impact properly, so clearly define when you’re starting your testing period and how long it’s going to last. When are your test sends going to be and when are your follow-up sends to see if you can disprove your hypothesis.
You might need to run your email test sends over various different campaigns, but this is upto you and the parameters you decide on.
Perform your Test and Record Results
Take results from your tests and turn them into valuable insights. What have you learnt from the results and do they confirm or disprove your hypothesis? Are the results strong enough to carry forward and take action? Or perhaps your insights could do with some more testing, just to check the results were a one-off? Maybe you didn’t use a big sample size the first time and you can scale up your testing.
Regular testing really helps you to understand your customers and their behaviours, creating better content for them in the future. Your email marketing strategy is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to engage your customers, so it’s well worth trying out different things.
For more info or if you need a hand, get in touch with our team at DOWO today.