Email marketing
Working for a relatively small company, I’ve not only designed email campaigns, but I’ve also helped to manage the email marketing strategy. It’s fascinating how small tweaks can lead to big results. A/B testing everything from the send name, subject line, content and more is so helpful in gaining insight into our email subscribers’ preferences. From my online research, I’ve found that there’s a lot of advice out there about what sort of subject lines and content strategy work best, but from my own experience, I’ve found that there’s no substitute for doing your own A/B experimentation, with the audience you’re working with. For example, I had read in an article that using a person’s name as the send name, versus a corporation’s name (like USCutter) gets better results. For a long time, I followed this wisdom— until I decided to test the hypothesis for myself. Contrary to what I had read, the email from “USCutter” saw a 13.66% open rate, compared to the 11.91% open rate of the other email using the name Jamie Draper (my email marketing alter ego!). To gather more data and ensure the results weren’t a fluke, I recreated the test for 3 more weeks and found consistent results: the emails from “USCutter” continued to outperform the emails from Jamie Draper.
Content has also been an interesting variable to A/B test with some mixed results. It seems that emails advertising simple retail style sales (e.g. Memorial Day Sale - Equipment Up to 50% Off!) had a higher conversion rate with large, simple graphics and big call to action buttons, combined with very little copy (10.44% vs 8.76%). On the other hand, product launches of more complex products had a higher conversion rate when combined with several paragraphs of copy (8.78% vs 6.26%)
Unlocking the power of segmentation
Another learning opportunity has involved personalization through segmentation. I did an audit of the top email campaigns of 2018 by open rate, click rate, conversion rate, and click to open rate, and found that in every category, segmented emails consistently showed up in the top 5. Unfortunately, due to technical problems between our e-commerce platform and our ESP, none of these emails were sent to a particularly large portion of the list. It’s still such a powerful data point to reference however, that segmented campaigns perform highly in every KPI, and this data will help me advocate this year, for fixing any remaining technical issues which stand in the way of increased segmentation.
A couple of years ago, we had developed a segmentation program based on purchase history of specific brands of material. We carry two primary types of material— adhesive vinyl for personalizing hard surfaces like walls, signs, vehicles, etc, and heat transfer vinyl for personalizing apparel and fabric. We divided our list by these two material types. We knew there was decent overlap between the two segments (i.e. people who purchased both types of materials), so we decided to send the adhesive vinyl edition on Tuesdays and the heat transfer vinyl edition on Wednesdays. During this time, we saw open rate engagement jump from hovering around 10%, up to 18%-20%.
