Early afternoon on day 3 of MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012 in Las Vegas, I caught a case study with Justin Bridegan, Senior Marketing Manager, MECLABS, presenting with Frank Cartwright, SVP of Product and Platform Development, GamersFirst, a free online gaming website that offers premium subscriptions, items and packages for purchase.
The challenge at GamersFirst was getting more people through their sales funnel and turning them into purchasing customers.
To improve the performance of its sales funnel, GamersFirst extensively tested its email marketing.
Frank says, “We wanted to transform the email marketing division from a cost center to a profit center.”
GamersFirst’s funnel includes 100% of website users are registered, the company gets 80% of those registrants verified, 60% login to the site, and only 10% actually make a purchase.
One group of tests involved sending the validation reminder email to registrants. GamersFirst tested the format of the email – text or graphic, and the timing of the email – 24 versus 72 hours.
The text vs. graphic test
Here is the text email:
And the graphic email:
And now the results of the test:
“Depending on what stage sales process you’re in, sexy graphics don’t always win,” Frank says.
The email timing test
This test compared sending the reminder email 24 hours after registration to 72 hours after registration.
Here are the results of this test:
“At this stage, the customer is barely engaged, so time is of the essence,” Frank says.
He continues, “I think we’ve proven that email marketing is a legitimate business on its own. This is a business.”
Related Resources:
Graphic vs. Text Emails: How differing approaches encouraged future testing
Conversion Window: How to find the right time to ask your customer to act
Email Relevance: 8 tactics for leveraging timing, segmentation and content
Behavior-based Email Send Times Lift Opens, CTRs and Referrals: Test and results