May 3, 2007

Tip of the Week: Test your marketing message

Online marketing makes it easy to test and tweak a campaign. Silverpop’s Elaine O’Gorman advises monthly e-mailers to test a different campaign element every month. To conduct a simple A/B split test, e-mail two versions of the same message to different groups. For example: Create two compelling offers. A: “Register early for a 15 percent discount” vs. B: “Register two for one low price.” Segment your list by 10-10-80. Send Offer A to 10 percent of the list, and send Offer B to another 10 percent. Within a couple hours, you’ll see which message generated the highest open rate. E-mail the top performer. Send the better message to the remaining 80 percent of your list. To learn more about this topic, read Online Analytics: From click-through to conversion in the May issue of EXPO.