E-mail Marketers Slopping it up: Part 47

OK, so “Part 47” is an exaggeration, but every time a new study on e-mail marketers’ practices comes out, it without fail illustrates how loosey goosey we are on this particular channel.

And I mean “we.” This newsletter is as guilty of slopping it up as any e-mailer out there—no, not spamming, just not adhering to simple, commonly used direct marketing tactics.

The most recent e-mail slop reminder comes courtesy of online marketing agency eROI in the form of its Q3 2008 Elements of Email Survey.

According to the survey, just 25% of marketers test subject lines on a regular basis. Just 25%.

The subject line for e-mail is akin to an outer envelope in direct mail. Is it even conceivable that a traditional direct marketer would fail to test copy treatment on the first thing recipients see?

Jeff Mills, chief researcher at eROI and author of the study, said he believes marketers’ lack of e-mail subject-line testing stems from a collective drive to create the perfect message.

“People want to create the perfect e-mail, and that means a perfect subject line,” he said. “Or it’s simply a case of the CMO wants that subject line in there.”

Either way, he said, there is simply no excuse not to test it.

“The cost is marginal compared to the potential payoff,” he said.

He also said marketers will avoid A/B split testing because they’re afraid half their campaign will flop.

“But think of it this way: Do you want 100% of your campaign to flop?” he said.

And the effort doesn’t have to be complicated. Testing subject lines can be as simple as sending a segment of the messages personalized by name and measuring the response against those that are not personalized.

Moreover, testing is the only way to know what people respond to. In an interview conducted recently for an article to appear in an upcoming issue of Multichannel Merchant magazine, Ernie Vickroy, marketing director, Time Consumer Marketing, recounted how in a recent test of the subject lines “Your Account Information” vs. “Manage Your Account Online,” the generic, non-call-to-action “Your Account Information” won.

“Maybe ‘Manage Your Account Online’ sounded like too much work,” he said.

Vickroy added that marketers who hesitate to test subject lines for fear of hurting the revenue potential of campaigns can still get an idea of what subscribers respond to by testing elements of non-revenue generating messages, as was the case with Time’s test of the account messages.

Vickroy also illustrated the benefits of subject-line testing in a talk he gave last year at Mercy College in New York to a room full of direct marketers organized by the Direct Marketing Club of New York.

During the talk, Vickroy showed how a boring, non-personalized reactivation offer for PEOPLE magazine outperformed a personalized subject line and two others.

“One of the things that we learned here is that sometimes boring is what works,” Vickroy said at the time.

Meanwhile, another area where many marketers are missing opportunities in e-mail is by failing to test including their Web sites’ navigation tabs in e-mail messages, according to eROI’s study.

Just over 30% of marketers include navigation tabs from their Web sites in e-mails, according to eROI. Interestingly, of those who use it, 15% said site navigation tabs are better than the main content of their e-mails for driving clicks, and 11% said the tabs are better at driving conversions than the main content.

“Site navigation [such as, say, ‘shoes,’ or ‘shirts’ on an apparel site] is a familiar way to browse content,” said Mills. “If I can get better clicks and conversions from [including] site navigation, why am I not putting it in e-mail? I just think it’s an opportunity, and that marketers should be at least testing it.”

To read the whole study, click here.