Test! Don’t Make this Email Marketing Mistake

Email marketing is alive and well. It is still one of the most effective ways of socializing your message to your fans, followers and potential customers. In fact, an article in Website Magazine states that Email is responsible for 56.8 percent of traffic arriving at the shopping cart and 67 percent of the conversions. Despite the importance of this medium, many marketers are still making a crucial mistake when sending out their emails.

A tale of two emails

Below you will see two emails, one that is all graphics from Canon, and another from Vonage which includes some readable text. Both are newsletters I’ve signed up for, so I’m interested in what they have to say. The important difference here is that one I can glance at and know exactly what the key message is, while the other first requires me to right-click and to view images before I see anything.

Canon                                                                                         Vonage

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which email do you think got a higher click-though?

I of course cannot answer this for these specific emails as level of interest in the offers certainly plays an important in click through rate. I can tell you from personal experience that more likely than not the one on the right from Vonage got more click through than the Canon one. Why? Simply because they told their story cleanly and quickly with text that was within view without my having to take further action.

Testing Variations of an Email is Critical

Recently I tested a graphics only email that looked great against an more newsletter type email with the exact same content. In this experiment the difference was dramatic.

  • Graphics Newsletter Click-through – 9%
  • Newsletter format Click-through – 23%

Of course one test does not a study make. However, I’ve done this in the past as well when a senior executive was upset that our newsletters were not pretty enough. On all occasions I’ve had similar results, the newsletter style email outperformed the graphics only newsletter every time.

What is your experience?

Side notes: Don’t forget to tie your social media and blogging strategy into your email marketing.

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