Optimize your email conversion rate with 3 quick tips . . .

We’re known for our website optimization services, but we regularly optimize our clients’ permission email campaigns as well.

We recently doubled the conversion rate of a campaign for a large automotive insurance company, and I thought we’d share a few tips that we learned along the way.

Include your company name in the subject line . . .

In a moment of “don’t reinvent the wheel” clarity, we decided to see what we could learn from some of the market leaders.

Although we’ve recently picked on Amazon.com – when looking at their outbound email campaign we noticed a trend:

Yep – nearly every email they send comes with their company name in the subject line.

By clearly identifying themselves, both in the “From” and “Subject” fields, Amazon has a better chance of the customer spotting who it’s from, and opening the communication

While Amazon has tremendous brand value that’s certainly helping them drive a response, we still thought that this was worth testing for our client.

In fact, this change worked quite well and we realized a 20% gain in open-rate, and an overall 15% improvement in click-through rate from that one small change.

Build creative no wider than 600 pixels . . .  

One of the simplest changes that we experimented with was changing the width of our client’s email templates – initially their templates were designed around a 735 pixel width.

To give you a sense of how to optimize your width, we’ve compiled the chart below outlining the most popular email clients and the preferred viewable pixel width for messages in each:

For our test, we reformatted our client’s emails to the following:

• 700 pixel width
• 600 pixel width
• 500 pixel width

We changed nothing else in the email and at 600 pixels we determined a winner that generated 17% more responses than the control.

Coming in a close second was 700 pixels with a 6% lift, and a distant third was 500 pixels at negative 14% versus the control.

This test boils down to a “know your audience” experiment – if you’re sending to corporate users locked into Outlook adjust appropriately – but as always, this is worth testing.

Include an unsubscribe button in your email header . . .

We’ve written about this before – the trend for large permission marketers like Groupon to put unsubscribe data into the top of their posts.

So we decided to test an ultra-simple HTML header:

The inclusion of this clear messaging had the following effects:

• A 7% improvement in responses. We received a statistically significant increase in our response rate on the test vs. control.
• A reduction in spam complaints. Even in permission email marketing SPAM complaints are a problem from consumers that don’t want to hear from you, giving consumers a clear and simple way to unsubscribe worked wonders.
• A small increase in unsubscribe rates. We saw a small increase in unsubscribe rates as you might expect, but not one that diminished the value of the test.

Overall a worthy test, and one that better services your end users – which is the point right?

We’d like to double your email campaign conversion rate too!

Let’s be honest – you don’t have bandwidth to spend as much time testing your campaign as we do!

If you’d like to see how we can make a drastic impact in optimizing your conversion rate – please reach out and  contact us today.

P.S. – Want to see more articles on email optimization?

We have a treasure trove of tips and data on email conversion rate – please leave a comment if you’d like to see more on this subject.