Experimenting and optimizing with the email content. Once you have identified the customer segment you want to target, the next monumental task for the direct marketing folks is to grab the audience's attention and keep it on the message you want to convey. The composition of the email, starting with the subject line, the images in the body, and the language in the text, can all be tweaked to create the right effect. In this role, you actually act like a movie director.
Just like a movie director uses light, sound, background score, action scenes, photographic angles, and actors' expressions to create the right mood and setting for the story he wants to tell, you need to harness all your skills to engage the receiver.
Today, the email marketing industry is exploring the impact of design through multiple versions of email content optimization. Matching the right content with the right segment of receivers does magic in improving the response rates of the email campaign. With email, the ability to try different combinations of the creative and monitor responses is relatively inexpensive and instantaneous, so we can experiment to find the effective combination that works for a segment of recipients.
Subject Line Testing and Analysis in Email Content
Generally, subject line testing is the first thing to try, with a significant impact. Some of the questions that one can try to answer by testing are:
- Is a short subject line better than a long one?
- What is the optimal size of the subject line?
- Is a question in the subject line better than a statement?
The objective here is to improve the open-to-sent metric. The more catchy the subject line, the more likely the receiver is to open your email. This is usually used with significant effect by crime thriller writers—“Sex, Lies and Money,” they say, will constantly improve ratings. Perhaps, there is something to a catchy heading. Our objective is to measure the improvement in the open-to-sent rate. Let us say you have created a set of four customer segments to whom you will send the same email. Look at some of the following headlines used by Amazon, WSJ.com, Bloomberg, etc.:
“Camera, Photo & Video Lightning Deals”
“Dear China, it’s over…”
“Is Best Buy a Better Buy?”
These subject lines tend to stand out in an already overcrowded inbox.
Image Size Analysis
Another practical approach is to add images to the email content optimization that draw attention to themselves while conveying the product you are trying to sell. As a marketer, you want to test the impact of image size. Perhaps a single image of the appropriate size tells the whole story. Creating multiple versions of the email with pictures of different sizes can give you a set of versions. These can be sent to different customer groups within a single segment. Use these versions of the email to monitor the response rates of the various versions.
Play with the Call to Action (BUY) Button
The next step is to create the “call to action” button that the receiver can click. The size, color, and position of this crucial element can make the difference between the receiver buying the product and moving on to the following email. Try placing this at the top of the page, in the lower-left corner, at the center of the page, right below the image, etc.
When you combine these various elements of the email header, images, call to action buttons, etc., you can come up with quite a few versions of the same email message.
Then you can send the traditional email you have been sending to one group of the chosen segment, and send the different versions to the rest of the groups of your segment. Most Email Service Providers (ESPs) will allow you to manage this effectively. The key activity is to gather the data from these email blasts and store them in a database for analysis. In a short four weeks, you can have enough data to guide you into making some empirical decisions about the versions that work and the versions that can be discarded. This forms your baseline for monitoring the improvement in response rates by using the correct version for the right segment.
Technology needed
The merging of content versions and the segments of your target list requires you to track responses over time to identify the optimal creative combination for each segment. So you need to track the individual email version sent, the receiver's response rate across the various response segments, and a large number of other variables that influence the outcome of your email campaign. You can’t achieve this without having a massive database for the marketing department. This database should focus on the individual receiver, the emails sent to them, and their response to various creative combinations. The size of this database can be significant, and performance can be a primary consideration. Suddenly, the meaning of ‘BIG DATA’ becomes abundantly clear to you. A typical email campaign database can store upwards of a few billion records over a 3-5 year period. To develop long-term insight, the marketing department needs to start with a long-term plan. If it is not possible to have a VLDB database in-house due to cost and IT support considerations, search for a vendor who can provide such a database for you. Without this kind of database, your ability to improve the campaign's response is quite tricky, if not impossible.
The current trend of cloud-based services offers an efficient solution. In a future blog post, I will review the characteristics of a database engine most suitable for marketing activities. Do you need a columnar or a row-oriented database engine, a massively parallel database engine? The database technology uniquely differentiates the marketing analytics solution.
