If your business isn’t using email marketing, you will want to consider the benefits of email to extend your brand and help new customers learn about the services your organization provides. Email campaigns are an inexpensive and easy way to get your message across to existing and prospective customers quickly and efficiently.
Because more and more people are doing their research and getting information via the Internet, email enables you to reach a greater number of customers where they are—online using desktop and laptop computers, as well as tablets and smartphones while they’re on the go.
When embarking on a new email marketing campaign, you can use A/B testing to increase your open rates, or the number of times recipients actually open your messages. An email marketing service such as Constant Contact makes it easy to perform a number of tests to determine the best versions of your email messages.
For example, if you are trying to improve the open rates on an already fairly successful email message with Constant Contact, you can do your A/B testing by splitting your next batch of emails into two groups. For group A, you send out the emails at a date and time that you think most people will be likely to open them and respond.
Then you send out the other half of the emails to group B at another time to see which gets the best results. You can run multiple versions of these experiments fairly quickly, and then get a better idea of the optimal time to send out your next messages.
You might find that more people ignore Monday morning emails because they are trying to catch up from all the email they received over the weekend and are busy planning out the rest of the week. It might be better for you to send your next test on a Wednesday.
Another way to improve your open rates with Constant Contact is to do A/B testing on the subject lines of your messages. Try a short subject line that focuses on the main point of your offering for group A, and compare the results with a longer subject line for Group B recipients.
Or, see whether people respond to your business’s marketing materials better if they are 500 words long or 1,000 words long. Depending on the nature of your message, a higher word count may be needed to convince people that your services are worth considering. Messages sent to busy executives might work much better if they are only 300 words.
The only way you can determine the best way to proceed is to continue experimenting and comparing results with your bulk email campaigns. You will be well rewarded for your efforts.
