Split Testing Emails
An interesting article recently appeared in Marketing Sherpa about an ecommerce retailer who wanted to determine the best day and time to mail their list. This example shows not only the significance of testing, but the role of segmentation in doing so.
The owner wanted to know the best day and time to increase clickthrough rates on their email campaigns. They already knew that Tuesday was the day of the week, but they wanted to take it further to see if the time would be a significant factor. Their tests showed that mailing at 9AM produced a 15.63% higher clickthrough rate than 4PM!
How can you apply this type of research to your business?
Use web analytics to study your email clickthroughs, website traffic and orders. This gives you a black and white control from which to work.
Depending on your site’s content and target market, you might test completely different times. For instance, if your target audience are gamers, you wouldn’t test between 9AM-4PM, because a huge chunk of your audience is in school at that time. You might not begin testing until 4PM.
Segment your list. This is a perfect example of why you’d ask questions to segment your list. In this case, they knew where their subscribers were located, making it easy to set up their test, segmenting their list into time zones. (Obviously, when it’s 9AM on the East Coast, it’s only 6AM on the West Coast!)
Test one thing at a time. In this case, the company determined the best day of the week BEFORE moving on to test the best time of day. Testing the best time of day AND the best subject line will not give you good, actionable results.
Questions? Comments? We’d love to hear your input!
Debbi Bressler
Email Marketing Specialist
GetResponse
March 19th, 2008 at 11:26 am
You hit me right here, I need this kind of information to enhanced my effort related to autoresponder. I had a suggestion though, can you also posting the source of its research sheet or such, I can make use of it as an informative source in creating a product.
March 20th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Thanks for your comments!
The above post was based on an article written by Marketing Sherpa. The original research article is now only available to their members.
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Debbi