4 ways to stop guessing and start testing your outreach
- Thu, April 29 2010
- Filed under: Marketing essentials
jhhwild, Flickr
At today’s release of their 2010 eBenchmark study, M+R shared four ways your organization can achieve a “data-driven culture.” That sounds rather dull and wonky to someone like me, so I’d call this four ways to “stop guessing and start testing” in your online outreach. Because one theme of today’s event was that testing makes a HUGE difference. Don’t just gut-check your next email - send it along with a similar but different version and see which does better with your community. If you don’t have to get an email out immediately, you might want to try the 10-90 test. Send an email to 10% of your list and see how it does. Then tweak it and hit the other 90%. See if it does better - and do more of what works. This can help you avert a disaster if the 10% does horribly - and learn if you do better the second try.
If this sounds appealing - and I hope it does - here is the approach M+R recommends:
1. Have a template for tracking your online outreach results. This is good advice, because most organizations are drowning in data. A simple template might list, by campaign, the following data along with a year to date benchmark for all of your campaigns. Try to keep it to one-two pages so you’ll actually be able to use it.
-Number of recipients of the email
-Open rate
-Click-through rate
-Response rate
-Number of responses
-Revenue
-Unsubscribe rate
2. Set benchmarks: Have some standard for telling if an email was a winner or a stinker. Your own benchmarks will be great - and you can also look at ones from the eBenchmark study, Convio, or Target Analytics.
3. Have a system: Keep track of each test, even if it’s only on a Google document, and evaluate and save the results. That way, you can look up past tests when making future decisions - and keep refining accordingly.
4. Lather, rinse, repeat: Set a goal for a campaign. Then measure the results. Then do it again. And again. Forever. Testing never ends. Learning is infinite. Fun!