Today, almost everyone gets email in their pocket. But this proximity to your audience doesn’t guarantee action. This class is intended for those who manage, or help to manage, email marketing programs and are looking to increase their outreach. This class will focus on ways to improve the response from email lists. First, we will cover general best practices that are applicable to all email marketing programs. Then, we will delve into how to use testing and data analysis to optimize your program.

1. Email Marketing Optimization
Jim Pugh

2. Overview
• Producing strong emails
• Maintaining a healthy email list
• Using testing to optimize your program
• Email testing simulation

3. Producing Strong Emails

4. What's the goal of your email
marketing program?
• Well, that depends on your organization or
company
• BUT... we all want email recipients to take
some action
• How do we make that happen?

5. Writing Best Practices
• Keep it short
• Tell a story – problem and solution
• Be timely

6. Writing Best Practices
• Have a clear ask
• Everyone needs an editor and checklister
• Subscribe to email lists (good and bad)

7. The Paradox of Choice
• People have a hard time making decisions
• More than one ask in the email means more
work for readers
• Cost of indecision outweighs benefit of more
choices

8. The Paradox of Choice
• Non-profit example: “RSVP for an event near
you” vs. “RSVP for THIS event near you”
– Tested with the Obama email list  100%
increase in signup rate for single event
• For-profit example: “Get a discounted trip to
Ibiza, Cancun, or the Bahamas” vs. “Get a
discounted trip to Ibiza”

9. Personalizing Your Emails
• Mass emails often come across as impersonal
• Can connect more with readers by
personalizing
• Examples: Name in salutation (“Jim –”), city in
subject line (“Events in San Francisco”)

10. Maintaining a Healthy Email List

11. What’s a “healthy” email list?
• Healthy email lists are active and growing
• You will lose people on your list over time – and
that’s ok
– In non-profit space, average “churn” rate is 19% per
year
• To have a healthy list, you need to:
– Get new people on your list
– Avoid losing the wrong people from your list

12. Growing Your List
• Very organization/company dependent
• Common approaches:
– Website signups/purchases
– Social media
– Online advertising
– Recruit-a-friend promotions
– Shareable content
• Buying email addresses is a bad idea

13. Keep The Right People On Your List
• Anytime you send an email, people will
unsubscribe – cost of doing business
• BUT, some emails will turn off more people
than others
• Pay attention to unsubscribe rates

14. Ways to Decrease Unsubscribes
• Be honest with your subject lines
• Don’t email too often (ideally, at most once
every two days) – this will also increase action
rates
• Segmentation

15. Segmentation
• Not everyone needs to receive every email
you send
• Emails should be targeted to people who are
likely to take action
• Benefits: Higher action rates, lower
unsubscribe rates, lower email frequency

16. Segmentation
• Example: Amazon.com offering new season of
Game of Thrones on DVD  People who
purchased the previous season or the books
• Example: Obama campaign offering new Earth
Day merchandise in their online store 
People who have listed the environment as an
issue they care about

17. Segmentation Categories
• Action history, action history, action history
• Issue interest
• Geography
• Language, gender, age, email domain, …

18. Using Testing to
Optimize Your Program

19. Why test?
• People are very bad at predicting what makes
the most compelling email
• Often have several different seemingly good
ideas – instead of guessing which is best, we
can measure it
• Lets you customize your program to work best
for your specific email list

20. A Brief Metrics Refresher
• Open rate: opens / recipients
• Click rate: clicks / recipients
• Action rate: actions / recipients
• Unsubscribe rate: unsubscribes / recipients

21. A Brief Metrics Refresher
• Open rate: opens / recipients
• Click rate: clicks / recipients
• Action rate: actions / recipients
• Unsubscribe rate: unsubscribes / recipients

22. A/B Testing
• Compare performance of two (or more) different
email drafts
• Process:
– Identify two randomly-selected “test” groups from
your full email list (2,000 people or more each)
– Send email A to one group and email B to the other
– Look at the response metrics to determine which
performed better
– Send the better email to the remainder of the list

23. A/B Testing
• Example: Same fundraising email draft, two
different subject lines
– Email A subject line about puppies, email B subject line
about cats
– Full list of 100,000 emails; select 10,000 randomly for A,
10,000 randomly for B
– Send emails, and measure results:
• 1,276 open A and 1,403 open B
• 267 donate to A, 195 donate to B
– Which do you choose?

24. Subject Line Testing
• Lowest hanging fruit – A/B
testing with subject lines
• Think of two to four good
subject lines for your draft
• Test our different subjects,
then send remainder with
the best one
• Common to see 15%+
improvements from tests

25. Content Testing
• Can test more than subject lines – different
email body copy
• Use same approach: run test, then send best
version to remainder
• Requires more work than subject line testing,
but can give bigger improvements (50%+)

26. Statistical Significance
• Higher test performance
doesn’t always mean
better – needs to be
statistically significant
• Make sure email test
groups large enough for
significance
• http://rebuildthedream.com/calculator.xls

27. Best Practice Testing
• Your email list is unique – different practices
will work better or worse than with other lists
• As a result, few universal best practices
• Subject line and content testing useful for
single email sends, but not for learning best
practices

28. Best Practice Categories
• Sender
• Email visual design
• Content structure
• Landing page

29. How to Run a Best Practice Test
• Use full list for A/B test groups – no remainder
• Use a higher statistical significance threshold
(98% or 99%, instead of 95%) – may need to
run multiple tests to achieve
• Repeat test in different contexts to make sure
results are generalizable

30. How to Run a Best Practice Test
• Example: Sending emails from “Barack
Obama” vs. “President Barack Obama”
– Split email list into two, randomly-selected 50%
groups
– Tested for fundraiser, sign-on letter, letter-to-the-
editor campaign
– Consistently saw stronger performance from
“Barack Obama” with 99% confidence
 Used “Barack Obama” as new best practice

31. Questions Before
Email Testing Simulation?

32. Email Testing Simulation
• http://rebuildthedream.com/ga-training/
• Choice of two campaigns:
– Obama campaign fundraiser
– “BeingSocial” discount offer
• Three different drafts, four subject lines each
• Use provided Email Tester to run A/B tests to
determine the best draft/subject combination
• Pay attention to statistical significance
• Note down why you made the decisions you did

33. Questions?