Split testing your e-shotsDo you spend hours planning email campaigns as a method to generate new business opportunities; only to find that they continuously deliver the same poor response rates?

You may start to think that you are wasting your time, but with a little bit of help you could be capitalising from one of the most lucrative forms of direct marketing. To do this, the answer is often to stop persevering with the same unsuccessful emails and simply start testing them!

Email testing has been a hot topic for marketers; and in my experience has been an effective and cost-free way to show how small alterations to your emails can have a surprising influence on their success.

The easiest way to start testing your emails is to run an A/B split test – divide your contact records into two even lists and send two slightly different versions of the same email to each. Features of your emails which you can begin testing are:

A) Email Subject Lines:A study by Jupiter Research showed that 35% of recipients will open an email purely because of the content of the subject line; hence it is critical to understand what style of subject line your recipients prefer. Try split testing you email subject lines to identify the headline which leads to the greatest amount of open rates.

B) Length of your Email:People usually scan their emails in seconds, so considering the length of an email will be an interesting element to test. Both an email that is too short or too long may deter from what the email has to offer, so you need to find which attracts your target audience. Remember though that regardless of length, all emails need a compelling offer with a clear call to action to deliver the greatest ROI.

C) Imagery or Plain Text?: Most emails are delivered with images turned off and so it may be important for you to test whether including images will enhance or detract from the email’s effectiveness. Finding the right balance of text and imagery is critical, as you will still want your emails to be legible and meaningful even when viewed with the images turned off.

D) Best time and day: Research has shown that the day and time you send an email can have a direct link with the email recipient’s attention span. Therefore, testing different times and days of the week to send out emails will enable you to shed light on when your recipients are more likely to open your emails and take a desired action.

E) Landing pages: Once someone has clicked on a link in your email, what then happens? You can write a great e-shot, but if your website does a poor job of converting these visitors into paying customers you have a problem. Conversion of click rates can be unsuccessful not due to the email content, but to do with the landing page on your website.

Content un-related to the e-shot, and lengthy registration forms for example can deter people away from leaving their contact details, so it may be a good idea to test different versions of registration forms. Generally speaking, no one wants to spend hours filling in lots of fields, so don’t ask too many questions as this may scare your visitors away. You should test different elements on your landing pages to learn what works best – I suggest starting with Google’s Website Optimizer.

After tracking your results, you should be able to tell exactly what works and what doesn’t within your emails and start to make the necessary improvements to unlock the best potential from your email marketing. Once your email messages and landing pages are optimized, they should both work in harmony to achieve greater lead generation.

ProspectSoft Email Marketing will help you manage this process at every step, keep an eye out for further developments later this year.

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About the author:  Lorna is a marketing expert at ProspectSoft, specialising in email marketing and communication ROI. Read more from this author