Tag : Testing

Using the preference center to retain & target your subscribers

Posted by TravelMailer at 2:53 pm

Not sure if your subscribers prefer to receive campaigns about soccer or snooker? Would they hang around if they received updates on country music, over calypso? There are immense benefits to knowing your subscribers’ interests, desired email frequency or even location, two of them being better targeting of your subscribers and less unsubscribes. Plus, in order to reduce email churn, you will want users to be able to update their active email address. Thankfully, you can achieve this and more, simply by using TravelMailer’s preference centre feature.

The preference center in a nutshell

Even if you’ve had an existing subscriber list for a while now, collecting preference information and giving subscribers the option of changing their preferences instead of simply unsubscribing is easy, with a little know-how as to how segments work. In an earlier blog post, we discussed how useful segments can be – if you haven’t tried segmenting your lists yet, do give this post a read.

Setting preferences is akin to allowing your subscribers to subscribe and unsubscribe to sub-lists – a subscriber to a widget store newsletter may be interested in Arduinos, but not Faraday cages, and therefore may only want to receive newsletters solely about Arduinos. Having a preference center allows the subscriber to state this:

Another benefit to setting up a preference center is a reduction in email churn, being the number of emails in your list that become inactive as people discard their email addresses. On average, 15-25% of all valid email addresses are discarded each year as people move to a different ISP or change jobs – with a preference center, subscribers can change their subscribed email address without completely unsubscribing from your list.

Setting up the preference center

In this example, we will set up a preference center with the three interest categories above, being ‘Arduinos’, ‘Faraday Cages’ and ‘Gewgaws’.

In your account, click on ‘Manage Subscribers’, then your subscriber list, then click ‘Custom Fields’. Under ‘Edit field’, create a new field with Data Type, “Multiple Options (can select many)’ and enter your desired preferences. Ensure “This field should be visible to recipients when they edit their settings in the preference center” is checked:

Subscribers will now be able to subscribe to these preferences, and you will be able to segment your subscriber list accordingly:

Customizing the preference center

To change the colors, header graphic, message and language of the preference center, click on ‘Client Settings’, then ‘Preference Center’. You can also preview the preference center:

Adding a link to the preference center in your email

Linking to your preference center is as easy as adding the following tags to your email content. When we send your campaign, we’ll convert this into a personalized link for each of your subscribers.

HTML emails -

this will be a link

Plain text emails -

[preferences]

Note that the preference center is only available to subscribers once the campaign is sent – in order to test the preference center link, you will need to send the campaign to subscriber list that includes you as a subscriber.

Editing your subscribe form

When creating a subscribe form, you can also add custom fields so that subscribers can state their preferences when they sign up for your email. In ‘Manage Subscribers’, click on your subscriber list, then, ‘Create a subscribe form’. Check the custom field you wish to add, generate the code and you’re off:

So.. How do I get my subscribers to edit their preferences?

Using our above example, say you wanted to start sending the special-interest newsletters (‘Arduinos’, ‘Gewgaws’…) to your subscribers. Here are some tactics you could try:

For existing subscribers – Consider sending an introductory email, suggesting that your subscribers update their preferences in order to receive more relevant updates on their favorite products. Also remind them that they can change preferences or their subscribed email address at any time. All future emails should contain a link to the preference center.

For new subscribers - In the confirmation, or welcome message, make sure the subscriber is made aware that they can change their preferences, or unsubscribe at any time. It doubly helps if you have already edited your subscribe form to reflect the preferences on offer.

Finally…

Preference centers are a very powerful addition to any email campaign as they not only encourage subscriber retention, but allow you to profile your subscriber list by interest, gender, or whatever field you please.

Using A/B testing to boost your email response

Posted by TravelMailer at 3:20 pm

The A/B testing feature was released earlier this year atop an amazing wave of excitement and anticipation. Many of you may have already had a chance to run A/B tests on your campaigns, however if you haven’t, you will find that its a very effective way to maximize your campaign results and learn about your subscribers. Secondly, it ensures that the message the majority of your subscribers receive is the most relevant choice – this is a win for everyone.

What is an A/B Test?

An A/B test involves two differing emails being sent out to a small portion of your subscriber list, with the most successful (‘winner’) email being chosen from the two after a defined period of time. The winner is then sent to the remainder of your subscribers.

You may have heard this practice being described as ‘10/10/80 split’ or ‘multivariate’ testing (however the latter involves changing multiple parts of your campaign). Perhaps you have heard reasons why people don’t use it, such as ‘it’s too hard to do’, or, ‘by the time I get the results from the initial test, it will be too late’. The good news is that we’ve set up a very powerful and easy-to-use interface for your to conduct A/B split campaigns. As the results arrive in real-time, you don’t have to wait until the following day to select your winning email; in fact, we’ll send the winner out automatically.

So… Why test?

There are a number of great reasons why you should optimise your campaigns using A/B testing, including:

The chance to experiment and learn from different subject lines – what will produce the better open rate, ‘Receive 20% off all products at ABC Store’, or ‘Discounts on all products at ABC Store’?
The opportunity to decide what email content is most relevant and responsive – Is layout A better than B? What call to action will work best?
Deciding which From name is best – Do you go corporate ‘ABC Store’, or personal ‘Bill Storeowner’?
No matter what you decide to test, A/B testing will always provide you with useful feedback on your campaigns. For example, you will soon find that the process of choosing the ‘perfect’ subject will rapidly become less of a guessing game and more of an empirical study.

Creating an A/B test campaign

Creating an A/B test campaign is similar to creating a regular campaign – after you click the ‘Create a new campaign’ button, you will see two tabs beneath ‘Step 1: Define the Campaign and Sender’. Click the ‘A/B split campaign tab’ and you will be on your way:

In this example, we’ll be selecting two different subject lines. You will be required to enter differing subject lines for Version A and B of this campaign. You can also personalize the subject line with the recipient’s first name, last name or full name:

Once satisfied, complete ‘Step 2.1: Select the format for this campaign’ as you would on a regular campaign. If you have chosen to send two differing emails, you will be presented with the option to include both of them on this step. Next, you will move onto defining recipients. At ‘Step 2.1 – Select the recipients for this campaign’, select your subscriber list as you would for a regular campaign, then click the ‘Define A/B Split’ button:

In ‘Step 4.1 – Size of test and how you’ll decide the winner’, you can define using the slider what percentage of your subscriber list will receive the initial A/B test emails, then what percentage will receive the winning version. These percentages (A/B/Winner) are entirely up to you, however they cannot be smaller than 1/1/98%, or larger than 25/25/50%. Commonly, 10/10/80% splits are used:

Secondly, you can define what criteria will be used to select the winner. You can select from Open rate, Total unique clicks, or Total clicks on a selected link. This will map back to how you will finally gauge the success of the email campaign, for example, if you are looking to drive visitors to your online store, you may want to select ‘Total unique clicks’ as the criteria for selecting a winner.

Finally, you can select the number of hours or days across which you want to run the A/B test. The default is to ‘Select a winner after 6 hours’, however depending how time-sensitive your campaign is, you may want to select more or less. Note: Setting a testing period of less than a few hours may impact the reliability of the test, as there may be insufficient click and open data generated to accurately determine a winner.

Once you’re done, click ‘Next’.

You will then be presented with a snapshot of the email campaign, including the two subject lines defined earlier. Review, then click ‘Test and define delivery’:

In ‘Step 5.1 – Test your campaign’, you will have the opportunity to test your campaign prior to sending it just as you would a regular campaign. Likewise for ‘Step 5.2 – Schedule campaign delivery’. It’s time to get sending!

Sending and monitoring an A/B test campaign

The excitement all happens once you’ve sent out your email campaign – and at this point, you will see the real-time presentation of results to be quite different from that of regular email campaign sends:

Not only will you be able to see how each version of your creative is performing in the test, but upon completion, you will be able to view the total benefit gained from running the test. This is an excellent way to admire your own handiwork, as well as learn how differing approaches to subject line, content and the from line can alter the results of an email campaign.

This is the first in a series of posts on A/B tests, which we hope will assist you in making your email campaigns more effective (and maybe even make testing fun). Feel free to discuss this post via the comments below.