According to MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, here are the most (and least) effective email elements to test and optimize …
So, how can you use this information to improve your own testing efforts? The MarketingExperiments Email Messaging Optimization Index heuristic is a tool to help organize your thinking and analysis of your email marketing tests …
eme = rv(of + i) – (f + a) ©
Wherein:
eme = email messaging effectiveness index
rv = relevance to the consumer
of = offer value (why)
i = incentive to take action
f = friction elements of process
a = anxiety about entering information
The MarketingExperiments Email Messaging Online Course teaches the full heuristic, but at a very high level, the heuristic helps you focus on the positive and negative forces that can affect your email messaging effectiveness. Let’s see how the heuristic relates to the top two most effective elements from the MarketingSherpa research (MarketingSherpa, like MarketingExperiments, is a MECLABS company).
Positive forces that affect email messaging effectiveness
On the positive side, you must ask yourself, “How relevant is my email to my customer? How valuable is the offer, and how strong is the incentive to take action?”
This is why target audience testing is so effective. What is relevant and valuable to one customer on your list might not be to another customer. By better targeting your offers and incentives to tap into what different segments of your list find relevant and valuable, you will improve the effectiveness of your email messaging. Testing can help inform this process.
Negative forces that affect email messaging effectiveness
Those positive forces drive your customer to act. You can think of them as the propulsion of an airplane. But much like drag, negative forces, the friction elements of the process and anxiety about entering information, discourage your customer from converting.
“For industries where the sale involves deeply personal information regarding finances or fitness levels, landing pages provide additional evidence to make the reader at ease to move forward on the path to purchase,” said W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst, MECLABS, and lead author of the Email Marketing Benchmark Report. “This is apparent in the education and healthcare fields, wherein 67% of organizations reported landing page optimization as very effective.”
Related Resources:
Marketing Research: Top email elements to test
Research Update: The state of email marketing testing and optimization
Email Marketing Optimization: Email messaging 101
Email Marketing Research: 7 steps for successful email marketing testing and optimization
Subject Lines Tested: How to write subject lines that double your clickthrough rate – Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. EDT
Well, the cool thing about the internet technology and tools that are available to the average small business today is the fact that we literally can know what out target audience is eating for breakfeast and we can how many times they go online, when they check their email and yeah when you know who your sending the email too, you know what will effect them the most, it makes perfect sense and yeah its just a matter of knowing your customer.