E-mail Marketing: Two Tactics to Test

By Reported Donna Loyle

When investing in your e-mail marketing campaigns, it pays to do a little testing. Here are two testing tips from Refinery, an interactive and search marketing agency.

1. Subject lines. Make them not only intriguing to recipients, but also benefit-oriented and related to the e-mail’s featured products, suggests Refinery in its white paper “Give Your eTail Sales Tactics a Tune-up.” One of Refinery’s b-to-b clients reported that it found far greater success with benefit-oriented subject lines than with promotional subjects. For example, instead of using a subject line stating: “Sale on Workboots,” try “You’ll Save Money on Rugged Workboots This Week Only.” “With their curiosity aroused by a benefit, customers will be more inclined to open the e-mail,” noted the white paper’s authors.

2. Color palette. Test the colors you use in your e-mail campaigns. “We recently analyzed a year’s worth of marketing e-mails for an eTail client and found that bolder colors pulled better clickthrough rates. A b-to-b marketer tested various color palettes and found blue consistently delivered the best results,” notes Refinery.