Social Email Marketing: Small Tweaks, Big Impact! The Power of A/B Testing #SMMSF

This presentation took place at the Social Email Marketing event, put on by Influence People with lead sponsor Constant Contact.  The conference took place on Friday, September 17, 2010 at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco, CA.  In this session, Shelley discussed how even the most simple tweaks and A/B testing techniques in email can improve KPIs and significantly impact traffic to your site.

I felt bad for Shelley, as earlier in the day some folks had bagged on MySpace.  But Shelley recovered nicely and the testing data she presented was informative and sometimes surprising!  The speaker was:

• Shelley Beaumonte, Online Marketing Manager, MySpace

Bullet Point Review!

• Almost any email variable can be tested.
• Determine your success criteria before sending email.

• Variable	Open Rate	CTR	CTO
  Subject	X
  Design		X	X
  Frequency	X	X

• Lessons learned:
  • Test 1 variable at a time, or else you won’t know what factor actually affected the data.
  • Don’t abandon the losing variable completely, you can still tweak it.
  • Know the objective of your email.
  • Never assume a small change = small results.
• There’s no standard minimum sample size.  No one number but you want it to be statistically significant.

Here’s Shelley’s’ slide presentation: