Email Marketing Split Test: Father's Day Specials
Is email marketing part of your online strategy? If not, why not? It’s one of the highest ROI activities that you can do and in my humble opinion, it is STILL the most effective tactic for most Gainesville area businesses.
Here’s why:
- Most businesses that we’ve talked to have target audiences that use email as their primary tool over social media or traditional media (like snail mail).
- Email is 1-to-1 communication.
- Email is affordable...you can literally send to thousands of potential customers for pennies.
- Email marketing is track-able - you can measure and monitor customer behavior and use that information to improve the quality of future marketing messages.
One thing that we LOVE to do with our email marketing clients is test different elements of their email message to see what resonates with their audience. Common things that you can test are subject lines, opening headlines, images and special offers. Success can be measured in a number of ways:
Open rate % - open rates are dependent on how engaging your subject line is. Testing different subject lines can give you insight into what your readers respond to
Click thru % - often times, you want the goal of your email to be to pull people through to your website. Click thru % is the measure of how many people that opened your email clicked on one of your links. Split testing text or image based links can dramatically improve click thrus to your website. Tracking multiple links in an email can and should be done and yesterday I wrote a blog post about tools we use. One of those tools is a handy google analytics tool that helps you track links like these.
Today we sent out an email blast for a seafood restaurant that is based out of Port Canaveral, Baja Tavern. We decided to split test two versions of the subject line used. Each version was sent to 50% of their list and this is simply called an A/B split test. It’s the most common form of test that you can run as it only involves one test element (the subject line).
Here are the two subject lines used:
Subject Line A:
Dad’s brunch is on the house for Father’s day
Subject Line B:
Dad’s eat free for Father’s day
Which subject line do you think will generate the highest open rate? Why?
Secondary question - what do you think my primary motivation was for testing these two similar subject lines?