Test, Measure, Optimize, Repeat – Part 1

This should be your mantra when email marketing. Measuring your results is more important than the results you actually get. With accurate statistics about your email marketing campaigns, you are armed to successfully improve your campaigns. And improvement is the name of the game. Let’s look at what type of things you can track and what each statistic means for your campaigns.

Before we begin, you must be familiar with the idea of A/B testing. It is also known as split-testing. The concept is that you have two variations of your emails being sent out at the same time to the same list of contacts. This means that for a particular message, you have two versions of your subject and two versions of your email body.

Half of your contacts will get the first variation and the other half will get the second variation. This allows you to directly compare different subject lines and different message text. Then once you have the data for each variation, you can decide what works best and change the worse one to try to beat your best one. Once you beat it, you start changing the old winner until it beats your new winner, and so on.

This is an easy way to always be improving your messages without guessing or sacrificing results during your test.

Statistics to measure and what they mean:

Deliverability
What is it: The percentage of emails that are not rejected by the recipient’s email server.

What is a normal deliverability rate: If you have a double opt-in email list, you should be able to achieve near 100% deliverability.

What it means: If you are experiencing low deliverability rates, this could mean two things; the quality of your email addresses is low or your email service is having problems sending your emails.

The quality of your email addresses depends largely on how you collect them. If you require double opt-in approval for your list, then you should have very high quality and very high deliverability. If you purchase your lists or do not require double opt-in, you are opening yourself up to fake, old, or incorrect email addresses and your deliverability will suffer.

Some reasons for your email service to be having problems include their servers being reported as frequent senders of spam and poor server management. If you suspect the cause of your low deliverability is your email service, you should switch immediately. They are causing your valuable connections to be missed before the recipient even sees the email!

Sending Day and Time
What is it: The time of day and the day of the week that your emails are sent out.

What is the best time and day to send: It depends on the demographics of your list.

What it means: If you send emails every day of the week at the same time of day, you will quickly see a pattern in your statistics. Some days will always be your best days, like Mondays, and some days will routinely give poor results, like Fridays.

Time of day also plays a huge part in the success of your email campaigns. Friday afternoons are notoriously bad for getting responses from people who work in offices, as anyone who has worked in one knows… everyone wants to get out of there!

Sending your emails late at night usually isn’t the best time, because it is common practice for people to quickly go through their email they received over the night assuming it is automated or spam.

For people who are working it is usually best to have your emails arrive right around the middle of the day before or after lunch. Your mileage may vary depending on your list, so analyze the time of day and day to determine what time is the best. And only send during that time.

– Dan