When it comes to marketing, there are 3 core principles that separate the men from the boys (or the women from the girls) and they are: testing, testing, and testing.
Even the most brilliant marketers in the world can’t predict how their market is going to react until they test their marketing piece first.
And you always want to examine one variable at a time. If you analyze too many variables at once, you may never know which made the biggest impact.
In an email, for example, some of the most important criteria to test would be:
- Subject
- Anchor text for link
- Body content (and length of email)
- Whether you use images in your email or not (and which ones)
Something as simple as a subtle difference in a subject heading can yield as much as a 83.5% increase (or more!) in open rate – just look at this example:
1: (Download) “Oh Hai, I mind-mapped Ur Biznezz”
Versus
2: “Oh Hai, I mind-mapped Ur Biznezz” (Download)
Now, which one do you think did better? (See the results).
And, the other criteria to test is deliverability.
image to the right is a snapshot from my junk mail folder. Notice the three emails in my junk mail folder are from Microsoft … and, ironically, this is Microsoft Outlook’s junk mail filter!
In other words, they put themselves into junk mail! Too funny….
Moral of the story … test!
Leave a comment and share some of your own results.
