The Easy Way To Make Sure Your Email Campaigns Always Hit The Mark

The first goal of any agent’s marketing campaign is to connect with your prospects and make some sales.

The second goal is less obvious, but just as important: you want to be able to learn from the campaign, to find out how to make the next even better.

The best way to start learning from your campaigns is to do split-tests. And the easiest and most affordable campaigns to split-test are email campaigns.

Start Testing… And Watch More Prospects Take Action

Setting up an email split-test is easy. Create two emails. They should have similar messages and make similar offers. But they should also have at least one key difference. Send the first to half of your list, and the second to the other half.

What should you test in your emails?

Subject Line. This is probably the most
commonly-tested part of an email. For example, you could compare the results from:

Stay Covered: Here's Your Health Insurance Quote

ABC Insurance — The Health Quote You Requested

Which one will get more people to open your message? Most marketers try to write subject lines that are snappy and engaging, without sounding too "sales-y." But lately, some are suggesting that plain, straightforward, and official-sounding subject lines work better.

Who's right? You have to test it to find out.

Headlines. Test how you lead into your offer. Which is a stronger reason for your audience to take action: the promise of a free quote, or the protection of coverage?

Get Your Free Quote From ABC Insurance

Protect Your Family With Coverage From ABC Insurance

When you test headlines, you want to look at who clicked though your message and actually took action on your offer. Surprisingly, many of the same people who suggest using plain and straight-forward subject lines say that headlines should be snappy and engaging.

But again, you should test it for yourself.

Graphics. If you're sending HTML-based emails, you have the option of including graphics with your messages. Try two different images and see which works better.

At ProspectZone we recently sent out a promotional offer with two different graphics — one of a man, the other of a woman. The result? The offer with the man on it got 53% more click-throughs than the other offer.

We had no idea that a picture of a guy in a business suit would do better than an attractive woman in a dress. That's why you test.

And The Results, Please

To find out your test results, you have to crunch some numbers. You should be able to get these numbers from your email service provider.

First, you'll want to know how many addresses were on each list. This is the number of messages sent.

Next, subtract the number of undelivered messages. These are addresses that aren't valid anymore. The number left over are your delivered messages.

Now, for each list, look at how many people opened the message. Divide the number of opened messages by the delivered messages. This is your open rate. If you're testing your subject line, this will tell you which one performed better.

If you're testing headlines, graphics, or any other part of the body of the email, you want to look at click-throughs. These are people who acted on your offer. You can find the number of click-throughs by looking at your web server logs to see how many unique visitors landed on your offer page. The number of click-throughs divided by the number of delivered messages is your
click-through rate. The higher the number, the better that message performed.

Different audiences in different markets react differently to sales messages. There's no "right way" to do marketing that always works for every prospect. You can never be certain what's going to engage people. But by testing, you can get closer to finding out.

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