A Guide To Testing Your Email Marketing

Email marketing is more popular than ever before! Almost all companies seem to be utilizing email campaigns these days because they are a relatively inexpensive marketing approach. But some businesses are not getting the most out of their email marketing.
In a recent eMarketer study more than a third of email marketers surveyed said they did not test their email campaigns at all.
While testing can be time-consuming, it is the most vital part of running a successful email campaign. With that in mind, why don’t all marketers take the time to test their email campaigns? Most reported that they simply didn’t know how!
I sat down with Ashley Boening, an email marketing specialist, to discuss email testing. Here is the information he shared with me:
- Body Copy
- Personalization vs. Standardization
- Personalizing emails with customer names or by user level can be very attractive for email marketers because it offers the appearance of a personal relationship with the customer. While certain personalization efforts like touting membership level perks and rewards standings can excite customers and encourage them to buy more frequently, overtly personalizing based on things like purchase history can actually achieve the opposite.
Sometimes personalization can feel fake to customers or make them worry about what you are doing with their personal information. In general, you should keep personalization genuine and only use it if it will actually benefit the customer. The key to achieving this is subtlety. Instead of saying, “You bought X so you might be interested in buying Y as well!” try simply sending them an email advertisement for Y.
- Calls to Action
- Images (buttons) vs. Text (links)
- People are more likely to click on buttons in emails rather than links. If all your calls to action are in images, however, and customers’ email clients block those images, your email success will be limited. The best compromise is to have some calls to action in buttons and some in links as backup in case the images don’t make it through to the recipient.





