What should you test

Compare email marketing to offline direct marketing and the opportunities to measure new things are almost endless. From being sent to key actions being committed on your web site, on one email promotion the whole purchase cycle can be monitored including:

• Delivery rates
• Open rate
• Click through rates
• Unsubscribe rates
• Sales Funnel
• Conversion rates

Being able to measure all gives a new headache.

What should you focus on to give the best return?

The below testing framework gives you a practical, real, commercial business model to decide what to test first.

The best way to demonstrate the testing framework is to work through a specific example:

This example campaign has 100,000 emails in the campaign and has the following results:

82.9% delivery rate = 82,900 delivered

31.1% open rate = 25,781 opens

5.2% click through rate = 4,311 clicks

0.15% Conversion Rate = 6.5 sales

6.5 sales spending £1,000.00 = £6,500

Now, you have some choices of what to focus on to improve:

• Get better deliverability rates and more emails into the inbox
• Encourage a higher number of click through rates
• Improve your conversion rate

As click through rates are a function of the number of delivered emails, improving your open rate bears no relevance in this model.

How could you do this

Get better deliverability rates and more emails into the inbox

Work with an ESP like Adestra with experience and optimised broadcasting tools to ensure that your messages are delivered. Spam check tools, monitoring procedures and optimised sending technology will improve your deliverability. For more information, please see our deliverability white paper

Encourage a higher number of click through rates

Test different design executions. Is your call to action clear? Are you over-reliant on imagery (dangerous with image blocking)? Can you use personalisation better to present relevant messages to people? Is the timing of your email optimised?

Improve your conversion rate

Is your marketing copy on your web site strong enough? Is the page simple to follow and clear how to commit your key action?

Use the payback model to identify what to improve first:

Improve deliverability by *10%*

• 100,000 emails in the campaign
• From 82.9% to 92.9% delivery rate = 92,900 delivered
• 5.2% click through rate = 4,831 clicks
• 0.15% Conversion Rate = 7.24 sales
• 7.2 sales spending £1,000.00 = £7,246

This results in a 12% increase in revenue

Improve conversion by *10%*

• 100,000 emails in the campaign
• 82.9% delivery rate = 82,900 delivered
• 5.2% click through rate = 4,311 clicks
• 0.165% Conversion Rate = 7.11 sales
• 7.1 sales spending £1,000.00 = £7,110

This results in a 9% increase in revenue

Start adding the two together and the improvements could be significant.

Adestra’s new conversion tracking tool allows you to measure and record all individuals who commit a key action from your email marketing. This could be buying products (it can record which product, basket value, order numbers etc) through to forms for downloading brochures. For more information, please contact moreinfo@adestra.com

Free whitepapers

All Adestra clients enjoy unlimited support. Let us support you with one of our free whitepapers on email marketing:

• Challenges facing UK Email Marketers: survey of email marketers and advice on how to overcome them
• The future for email marketing: steps to take today to prepare for the future of email marketing
• SPAM Filters demystified white paper: a marketers briefing
• How to pick the right email partner handbook
• Best practice email design: A guide for designers and marketers to creating HTML for modern email clients

For your free email marketing whitepapers, please contact us