Email: Are you really testing and refining?
If you were able to attend Carolyn’s “12 Can’t Miss Strategies for Online Retailers” webinar with Elastic Path today (Don’t worry — if you missed it, Linda Bustos posted a great recap on the Get Elastic eCommerce blog as did Chad White at RetailEmail.Blogspot), I want to elaborate a little on her last point ‘Test, Measure, Refine’. We preach this ALL the time (and not just us, you’d probably hear any ‘email expert’ saying the same thing) but it doesn’t always happen in practice. I fully admit, I’ve been guilty of this myself with our own email marketing!
The best way to keep on top of testing and refining is to create a plan to re-visit and evaluate your program every three months, six months or whatever makes sense with your emailing schedule. Have an in-depth analysis of your results, are open/clicks/conversions increasing? decreasing? Look at which links have been most popular, or which email have yielded the highest conversions, and use that as your starting point for what to test. Assign someone on your team to stay on top of it and make sure it’s happening regularly.
Things can change - and fast. I’m willing to bet, if you haven’t done any testing over the past while, you are probably seeing a general trend of decreasing results in some capacity. While you can just keep doing what you’re doing–and it probably will continue to make you money–you can always do better with just a little extra effort.
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Posted in Email marketing, Kelly Rusk
1 Comment
Rishi Rawat at 12:16 on November 9, 2007
I think marketers need to be cognizant of the fact that the amount of media people consume is going up while the hours in a day are not. Last month I started (finally) using the Google reader; as a result I now have access to more targeted blogs, such as yours. So thanks to better targeting technologies we have less free time to idyllically read email promos from hardcore commercial retailers.
We just need to rethink our entire email marketing strategy. This drop in open rates is, without a doubt, a secular trend.
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