Constructing an Email Test


If you are like most marketers, you have yet to do an organized email promotion to your customer base. Here is how to go about it.

To begin with, you probably have a database of names and addresses, but you probably have email names for only a few (or none) of your customers. Your first job is to get the email names into your customer records. As you know from this book, this process takes a long time and involves revising all your forms and telemarketing scripts to be sure you start capturing these email names, with permission to use them.

To jump-start the process, you can get opt-in email names appended. You can get help with this. CSC Advanced Database Solutions, for example, has access to a database of more than 50 million households that have provided their email names to various vendors and given written permission for their use for commercial promotions. You can ask CSC or some similar vendor to run your house file against this list and append your customers’ email names to your database records. This will cost you about $250 per thousand, or about $0.25 each. (This may sound expensive to you if you have not yet read Chapter 5, “The Value of a Name.” After reading that chapter and doing your homework, you will know whether spending $0.25 per name is worth it for you.)

There are dozens of other methods of gaining customer email addresses. You should be sure that customer service and telesales always ask for the emails and for permission to use them. There should be a space for an email address on every form that customers fill out. Some companies have contests for their customers, with email addresses required for entry.

Opt In or Opt Out

When you get customer email addresses, you should be sure that the customers have given you permission to use them for communications. There are two methods for ensuring permission:

  • Opt In requires customers to check a box saying that they want to hear from you. The result of using Opt In is often a 5 or 6 percent customer email acquisition rate.

  • Opt Out requires customers to check a box saying that they do not want to hear from you. The result of using Opt Out is usually an 80 to 90 percent customer email name acquisition rate.

In both cases, customer privacy is protected. Customers can easily show their unwillingness to hear from you. Don’t use Opt In. You will never get enough customer email addresses to create a viable email marketing program.

Of course, you must make it easy for customers to discontinue further emails at any time by providing a “one click” option on every single email you send to them:

  • “To discontinue receiving any further promotional emails from our company, Click Here.”

Should you get permission to sell the customer’s email name to others? Of course you could. But do you want to? Many established businesses find that the revenue gained from renting customer names is small compared to the negative perception of the company being in the name rental business rather being a customer-friendly supplier. You will have to decide what image you want to project to your customers.

Let’s assume that one way or another you have gotten email names and permission to use them for 100,000 of your existing customers. How do you go about developing a promotion test?

For direct mail, you would probably test two different packages, sending them out simultaneously to 50,000 people each to see what the response will be. You might even segment your file into 10 different segments of 10,000 each, with slightly different copy, offers, and packages. After 6 weeks you would know which segment did the best job and had the highest return on investment.

That is not at all the way email campaigns are run. In the first place, you seldom, if ever, should send to your whole 100,000 at once. The best plan is to divide your file into 20 different segments of 5000 each. Then spend some time crafting the right appearance for your emails on the customers’ screens. Figure 6-8 shows some samples of senders and subjects.

click to expand
Figure 6-8: Email Sample 1

Which of these grab you? How many of them would you delete without reading them? I would say most of them. Only two caught my eye: VAR Business and AOL. I subscribe to VAR Business and I am a paying member of AOL, so I might open these two. In fact, I have no interest in sending emails in five languages or in news about Computer Associates, so I would delete those two also. Figure 6-9 shows another group.

click to expand
Figure 6-9: Email Sample 2

There’s not much that looks interesting in this group either, except possibly the message from Cyber9014 about processing online transactions. That might be a legitimate offer.

Lauren Arden sounds like someone’s name. It could be a legitimate email that would be of interest. I decided to open that one. It was interesting. It began:

As a full Web-service provider, we are helping vendors sell their products directly to consumers. Therefore, prices for some of the products are the lowest available. All 500,000+ discounted items can be found by visiting www.ec-OurCity.com.

Let’s try another group (see Figure 6-10).

click to expand
Figure 6-10: Email Sample 3

What stands out here is the Account Specialists with a subject Email Centre. Why the English (rather than American) spelling of Centre? It caught my eye. The email said:

The “@aol.com” part of your email address is owned by someone else and is known as a Domain name. You will have datamktins@aol.com as long as you subscribe and pay each month. You never really own your email address, someone else does. You just rent it.

It went on to offer the firm’s services to help me own my own email name.

The Valentine’s Day reminder also looked interesting. Notice that dmckin324 is sending me two emails: one on credit cards and one on background checks. He has destroyed his credibility by sending two emails so close together.

What do these things tell us about emails?

  • There is a lot of competition, particularly from really junk email.

  • Junk email is much more widespread than junk direct mail. Email is so cheap to send that any worthless smut purveyor can afford to send millions per day.

  • People look first at who sent the email and second at the subject. They seldom look at the text of your emails at all, unless the email address and subject pass a validity test.

  • You need to give a lot of thought to what your email address should look like.

  • Then spend some time figuring out how to present your subject. Settle on three different email addresses and three different subjects.

  • Once you are happy with these six, you can begin to worry about what to say in the email. (I am reminded of experts at Ralston Purina, who reportedly spent more than 6 months designing the appearance of the perfect cereal box before they got around to figuring what to put into the box!)

Designing the Text

Once people have opened your email and read your copy, what do you want them to do? You have to make it easy, obvious, and compelling. Here is how one merchant did it:

Click here to search our database with no obligation.

This takes you directly from the email to the merchant’s Web site, where it offers its services (see Figure 6-11). This is very seamless and compelling copy.

click to expand
Figure 6-11: Web Site for Designing Your Web Address

Figure 6-12 shows the text of the Valentine’s Day email. Each underlined section of text is an automatic link to a professional Web site. This is the way to go.

click to expand
Figure 6-12: Text of Valentine’s Day Email

Few email texts are this organized. Most of them make you work at filling out forms and emailing them to someone, with a response generated in a few days.

Beginning Your Test

Your first step is to send 5000 emails in a head-to-head test of two different email addresses and one subject (2500 to each). You will know within 48 hours which of the two produced the better result in terms of click-throughs, responses, and sales.

Now take the better of the two email addresses and try two different subjects with the next 5000 names. Save the best email address and the best subject. Experiment not only with the email addresses and the subjects, but with different texts and different days of the week for your mailing.

Gradually, over the next couple of weeks, you can work your way through your 100,000 customers, getting better and better response rates as you go. You may start with a 0.5 percent response rate (12 responses out of 2500). At the end of 10 tests, you might have worked your way up to 2 percent (50 responses out of 2500)—that is four times better than the rate you started with. You might even do much better. Many companies that use emails to market to their existing customers have achieved response rates of 20 percent or more.

The key to success here is constant testing. You simply cannot do this with direct mail. With email, if you do it right, you can achieve tremendous success in a very short space of time.




The Customer Loyalty Solution. What Works (and What Doesn't in Customer Loyalty Programs)
The Customer Loyalty Solution : What Works (and What Doesnt) in Customer Loyalty Programs
ISBN: 0071363661
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 226

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net