Prioritizing Your Email Marketing Tests To Drive More Leads
After combing through my spam folder for real messages that were improperly filtered, I counted one in every three emails as legitimate promotional offers that I had subscribed to. Some poor marketer somewhere had spent effort creating the perfect email, only to have it end up in my spam.
As marketers, we are tasked with eliminating situations like the above so we can deliver more leads. Because of this, we sometimes make the mistake of testing too many changes at once, making it difficult to judge the efficacy of each change. Before you start your next test, try these steps to help prioritize your email marketing tests to get more leads.
Step 1: Gather your benchmarks
Benchmarks will let you gauge how your tests perform. If you don’t have historical data to benchmark against, you can always compare against industry benchmarks.Step 2: Select the right metrics to optimize
Select a handful of metrics that you would like to improve based on your goals. I always recommend starting with the basics. My go-to metrics are: Unique Open Rate, Unique Click-Through Rate, Lead Volume, Wins, and Unsubscribe Rate. Once you’ve got the basics down, you can move on to more sophisticated metrics.Step 3: Prioritize your tests
Prioritizing your tests starts with understanding how metrics relate to one another. Metrics are often highly dependent on one another, meaning when one metric changes, it can impact others. Further, if metrics are hierarchically dependent, then improving a metric at the top of the hierarchy can have a domino effect, improving all subsequent metrics.Based on the domino effect, the chart below provides guidance on what metrics to improve first to make the biggest impact. Here’s how it works. Follow steps 1 and 2 to determine which metrics are underperforming. If multiple metrics need to be optimized, start with the metric at the top of the chart, test your change, and go down the list accordingly. And, remember, one test at a time!
Lastly, when all key metrics are in a place that you are happy with, start growing your database through both paid and organic methods. Happy testing!
About the Author
Karen Parisi is CEO and Founder of Oodi, a marketing marketplace to compare, purchase and manage marketing services. With nearly 15 years of marketing and business development expertise, she has held leadership positions at B2B software companies such as Thomson Reuters and iCIMS.
