Web Clinic Extra: How testing email design reveals a 26% gain (and a 52% loss)

By Austin McCraw On Jan 20, 2010

Email design always proves to be a hot topic with marketers. And when you have top agencies competing against each other, the fire just gets hotter as we learned during last week’s live web clinic – Maximize your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain.

We received a plethora of questions, most which we could did not have time to address during the hour-long clinic. So, as with every Web Clinic Extra, we have picked a handful of the most common questions to address here on our blog. This week we pulled in Andy Mott, the Senior Manager of Research Partnerships, to answer these questions…

Email marketing is a topic that comes up often in the MarketingExperiments community. In fact, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin is delivering a keynote today at Em@il Summit ’10 in Miami as well as teaching a pre-summit Live Email Optimization Workshop. If you couldn’t make it out there this year to get valuable insights from your peers and industry leaders, come back to the blog on Friday for some key takeaways from this year’s summit.

You can view a replay of the clinic or read the latest issue of MarketingExperiments Journal. Our next live web clinic, The Five Best Ways to Optimize Email Response (Part 2): How to craft effective email messages that drive your customers to action, will be taught on February 3rd from 4 to 5 p.m. EST.

Austin McCraw 35 posts 28 comments

Austin McCraw, Senior Director, Editorial Content, MECLABS Institute. From Web clinics to certification courses, Austin works behind the scenes to bring our research analysts’ discoveries to our audience in clear and creative ways. Before joining MarketingExperiments, Austin was the Promotions Director for a PBS affiliate in Gainesville where he was in charge of publicizing local and national programming. A graduate of the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, Austin specializes in new media and video production by day and producing family memories with his wife and two children by night.

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3 Comments

John Hyde :: York, England says 15 years ago

Video interview is a great format for this subject.

I like the line: “when you lose, you learn”. Like skiing – if you never fall over, then you’re not trying hard enough 🙂

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Chris Litster says 15 years ago

Really appreciate all the information and research here, thanks. I’ve noticed that in the latest promotional emails from Marketing Experiments that you’ve included a really nice and visually appealing Contact Us ‘Action Palette’ in the top right of your emails. Did you test the impact that including that action palette had (or did not have) on people taking advantage the main Call to Action in your emails?

Would love to see any research you have on that.

Thanks,

Chris Litster

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Daniel Burstein says 15 years ago

Thanks for the question Chris.

We arrived at our new template through a “radical redesign” experiment between the control and three treatments (you can read more about this experiment through the first link referenced in this post).

In this email message design template experiment, we also collected additional comparative performance data, but have not yet finished analyzing it for meaningful discoveries (for our own email sends) or transferable principles (that we can share with the MarketingExperiments community).

As we continue to discover new insights into email marketing through testing of our Research Partners’ email sends, as well as our own, we will share those findings right here on the blog and on our research website — MarketingExperiments.com.

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