Testing Your Email
Test your email before sending it to your whole list
A problem that many email marketers have today is they do not properly test their email campaigns before sending them out to their entire list. They will simply write up an email, then fire it off to their list and await the results. Sometimes they'll make a lot of sales and other times they won't. They will not understand why their promotion performed poorly and will often blame it on the product for not converting well, instead of realizing that it may have been due to a poorly written email.
Since the cost of sending emails is so cheap, many people falsely believe the key to generating more sales is to send as many emails out as possible. They do not bother taking the time to create an effective, high converting email.
You don't need to send more emails to your list to increase profits (and risk an increase in the number of people that unsubscribe). You can dramatically increase your conversions by performing some simple, straightforward testing.
Here's an example:
Let's say you have a list of 30,000 subscribers and you want to get the highest possible conversion rate. First, you would start by optimizing the open rate of the email (i.e. the number of people that open the email), which is one of the most important steps since you can't persuade people with your message if they don't even open the email.
Instead of emailing all 30,000 subscribers a single sales pitch, you would send four or five separate emails - each with its own subject line - to 500 people from the list. For the sake of this example, let's say you send four separate emails totaling 2,000 emails (500 per email).
You would keep track of the open rate for each type of email. For this example, let's assume you have the following open rates for the four subject lines used in the emails:
- 9%
- 17%
- 3%
- 12%
As you can see, there's quite a big difference between the best and worst subject lines with respect to open rates.
Now that you have the subject line that produces the highest open-rate, what should you do next?
You now test different details of the email body. There are many things that can be tested including the format of the email, the length of the email, the tone used in the email, the type of offer, and even the time of day the email is sent.
For the purposes of this example, let's say you're testing the difference between two types of offers. You would send out an email with the first offer to 1,000 subscribers and then send out an email with the second offer to 1,000 subscribers. Use the best subject line from your first test in both emails and you track the number of sales generated from each. It is important to use separate tracking codes in each email so you know where the sales were generated.
Let's say that the first email with the first offer generated 6 sales and the second email with the second offer generated 2 sales. This would give you a 3.5% conversion rate for the first email (17% open rate x 1000 = 170 => 6 sales / 170 = 3.5%) and a 1.17 % conversion rate for the second email (17% open rate x 1000 = 170 => 2 sales / 170 = 1.17%).
Now that you have the best subject line along with the highest converting email body, you can send your email to the remaining 26,000 subscribers from your list!
If you're not convinced testing is worth it, just plug a sale amount into the numbers above. Compare your results using the best subject line along with the highest converting email body, and the worst subject line along with the lowest converting email body. You will be shocked by the difference!
