You must have known that one way to further build trust, long time relationship and sell more of your services or product is to invest in email marketing.
Email marketing or what is known as permissive marketing has been a practice that has existing for long and it has been proven to have the highest conversion rate.
When a web visitor comes into contact with your website and subscribe directly to your newsletter or indirectly through an offer on your website, they invariably share with you one small but crucial part of their life with your; their email address.
By giving their email in exchange for an offer on your website, they are saying “Hey, we love what you doing and we don’t mind hearing more from you”.
Why is this important? Unlike email spamming, permission based marketing is based on mutual trust.
When anyone subscribe to your email list, they are saying “I give you my email and I expect reasonable and relative offer from you in future and when I get any email from you, I won’t be mad at you”.
Unfortunately while you might have a huge permissive list, one of the challenges you will face apart from getting in your list inbox due to mail provider’s filer is how to make your list interact with your email.
One of the ways you can do is to make sure that your list open your email apart from having a good headline is to make sure that they get the email at a time when they are willingly to open it.
Basically, you don’t want to send an email which your list will get, look at it but due to one reason or the other, they don’t have time to read it.
One way to make sure your email subscriber gets to read your email is to send it at different time to test when you have the highest open rate.
This method is based on the principle of A/B testing. When conducting an A/B test you want further improvement on your strategy.
That was what we did with our newsletter. Every two weeks at VTNS Solutions, we send out a bi-monthly newsletter
.
We wanted more people to open our newsletter so we decided to change the time we send our newsletters.
Since most of the people on our subscriber’s list are majorly small business owners, we wanted to test the theory of sending the email at a later day instead of sending it as against 4pm on Monday’s.
Our hypothesis was “If we send our email campaign on a weekend, would we have same open rate”?
Here is the results of the email campaign when we change our sending day from Monday to Saturday.
If you take a look at the two different reports, you will find out that the messages sent over the weekend have a much higher open rate than the one sent during the week.
Changing the day of the week when we sent out our newsletter has resulted into a 5x increase in our open rate.
3 Key lessons learnt A/B testing our newsletter sending time:
- Understand your audience: Every website audience is different. Different people read blogs and website for different purposes. Understanding who your audience is and when they want to be reached is crucial to getting your post or email to read the potential client.
- Have a baseline: Before running any A/B test you need to have a baseline. Do you want to test your open rate or do you want to test your click-through. Setting up analytical tracking can help you get started.
- Don’t be afraid to test: Testing paralysis? Don’t be afraid to. The worst that can happen is that you would have learnt what worked or not worked for your business or brand.
Conclusion:
Running an A/B testing should be part of your marketing strategy. Do not be afraid to carry out your own testing. Each website audience is different, you therefore need to know what works for you.
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