How to Test Email Marketing to Improve ROI

With the number of email users expected to reach a whopping 4.48 billion in 2024, email marketing if handled with expertise can prove to be in an incredibly powerful marketing tool.
Here’s a quick look at some of its top benefits.

• Cost-effective Approach

According to the State of a survey done by Litmus in 2019, email offers the highest ROI for marketers. For every $1 spent on email marketing, you have the ability to earn $44. Further, creating stellar email campaigns neither requires print or postage fees, nor any manpower. All in all, email marketing helps you reach more customers for less money. Therefore, email marketing isn’t just an effective strategy, but an affordable one too.

• Consistent Awareness

Email marketing has the ability to reach customers and prospective buyers right into their inbox. This, in turn, works effectively in reminding customers about your brand and business, thereby making you stay on the top of their mind all the time. Even if prospective customers don’t contact you instantly, they would definitely choose your business when they need any products or services. In addition, if your subscriber base likes the content you send to them, the chances of them recommending you to others becomes higher.

• Easy Analysis

With email marketing, tracking and measuring critical metrics such as open, click, and bounce rates becomes easy. These metrics can help you extract critical insights into the behaviour and interests of potential customers. As a result, you will get a clear idea about a lot of factors. From the content that resonates best with your customer base to the days with the highest open rates, you can know it all and modify your strategy to get the best possible results.

Are you ready to reap the above-mentioned benefits of email marketing? Moreover, with an approximate of 281 billion emails sent and received every day across the globe, using it the right way can improve your ROI for sure.

This is where Email testing can come in handy. It would help you drive better email metrics through more relevant emails. In fact, testing is one of the most powerful aspects of email marketing. Remember, email marketing doesn’t come with a set of fixed rules. To put it in other words, what works for one company might not work for you. So, make sure you test your email campaign to extract the best out of it.

Now, the question is what elements you need to test for seamless functioning of your email marketing campaign? Here’s a comprehensive look at it.

1. Subject Lines

With 72% of marketers routinely testing subject lines for optimizing performance, subject line surely is the most popular email element to test.
Therefore, if you wish to nail your email marketing strategy, it becomes imperative to test it. Remember, engaging and appealing subject lines don’t only entice subscribers to open and click-through your email but also accelerate both the sale and ROI. Consequently, you can take into consideration subject lines that are concise, precise and test it to have a clear idea about the kind of content that resonates the best with the customers. The results will surely unleash the key to a successful email marketing campaign that would improve your ROI.

2. Preview Text

You can trigger ROI by testing your preview text too. Avoid being vague and ambiguous with your preview text. Instead, make prudent use of this space and give a clear idea about the content of your email. It would let the customers get an insight of what you are going to offer them. So, start by testing it and see what kind of preview text is likely to be relevant to the customer. For instance, you can begin by testing “Don’t miss our exclusive offer” or “Register now to save your favorite seat” as the preview text. This will help you know exactly what kind of preview text prompts the user to take necessary action.

3. Email Content

Make sure the content of your email is creative and appealing for subscribers to get inspired and take the required action. In short, your email copy should be relevant enough to motivate your customer base to make a long-lasting relationship with you. You can achieve the desired results by testing various aspects of the email copy mentioned below.

• Comparison between plain text and HTML email
• Analysis of question and answer format
• What works better between numbered lists and bullet points

All in all, testing the above-mentioned variants will help you modify the copy of your email a little, thereby greatly influencing your ROI.

4. Email Design

The design of your email consists of a variety of features such as visually appealing components like responsiveness, rich media and interactivity. So, based on the kind of the business you have, you must test and analyze the use of these design elements such as GIFs or images within your email content. For instance, if you belong to the e-commerce sector, try making use of GIFs within your emails and see how you are able to access the click-through rate and conversions while pumping up your ROI. Here’s how Great Jones does it.
Source: Reallygoodemails.com

5. Call to Action

Call to action encourages subscribers to take a certain action. Whether you want your subscribers to sign up for an event or are looking forward to enhancing the sale of a product, CTAs can help you do the needful while boosting your traffic and ultimately enhancing the ROI. Hence, you should make your CTA top-notch. Subsequently, test and see if talking in first person is good or having a second person narrative is better for your CTA copy. It will help you get an idea of what works best for your subscriber base. However, writing in the first person prompts subscribers to take quicker action because of the fear of missing out. This is the reason Unbounce experienced a drop of 24.91% in its conversion when it replaced “my” to “your” in the CTA copy.
In addition, you must know actionable CTA copy converts quicker. Here’s a look at a study by Marketing Experiments that shows how different actionable CTAs have different click-through rates.
Also, testing and making a comparison between single and multiple CTAs within your email will help you analyze if there is any change in the conversion rates and ROI. See how Brooklinen is making great use of multiple CTAs in its email.
Source: Reallygoodemails.com

6. Discounts or Offers

Discounts and offers are a great way of attracting new customers while retaining the existing ones. You can test this criterion by comparing non-urgent versus limited time offers in the emails to see which one fares better. In addition, you can also send a countdown timer to see how well it does in the metric charts. Here’s a classic example of countdown timer from Suiteness.
Source: Reallygoodemails.com

7. Email Send Time

The time and day of sending the email have a great impact on the engagement rates and ROI. Therefore, it is important to send your emails when subscribers are most likely to open and click-through it. In this context, you can test the optimal sending time of your emails and see which days render the best of results. According to a recent report by Oribi, Tuesdays are the best day for sending emails by online retailers.

8. Email Personalization

74% of marketers are already using targeted personalization to enhance customer engagement and ultimately increase their ROI. Moreover, with 67% of marketers looking for improving their personalization strategy, it sure is a great way of boosting your ROI.
After all, it doesn’t only increase the relevancy but also makes the overall email strategy more applicable to individual subscribers. You can begin email personalization by simply adding the first name of the subscriber in your email instead of a generic “Hey there”.

In addition, if you want to take your personalization strategy to the next level, you can even opt for an automated behavioral trigger email campaign. For instance, if a subscriber purchases something from your website, you can make use of the trigger email to send a follow-up email with related products that complement the purchase just the way Crate&Barrel did.
Source: Reallygoodemails.com

These are few of the many tricks you can use to ace your email personalization strategy. However, make sure you test these strategies beforehand to get hold of the metrics and understand how it works for your target audience.

9. Email setup that boosts the deliverability

And what’s the benefit of writing great emails if they won’t reach the recipients? Implementing several authentication methods makes you phishing-proof and improves your reputation as an email sender.

SPF tells email servers which domains are authorized to send on your behalf. As a result, emails sent from the likes of “@m1cr0s0ft.io” will quickly be discarded. DKIM, on the other hand, ensures the body and headers of a message are left untouched on the email’s way to a recipient.

The proper DMARC setup, on the other hand, takes advantage of both previous methods and adds another layer of security. It also instructs the servers on how to treat the emails that fail either test. It definitely pays off to have all three methods implemented.

Wrap Up

According to Data and Marketing Association (DMA), email is the top digital channel for ROI. So, whether you are a small business or a giant MNC, it is high time you make extensive use of email marketing to be successful in the long run of business. So, are you ready to take the email plunge and win the hearts of your subscribers already? Take the help of the above-mentioned points to test your email marketing campaign and see how you leverage it for generating ample ROI for your business.

Happy testing, email geeks.