Testing e-marketing effectiveness is getting easier

Testing the effectiveness of marketing activity has always been a challenge. It’s becoming more important in the current economic climate. So it’s always good to hear about new ways to do it.

Interspire are about to launch the latest version of their Email Marketer tool (http://www.interspire.com/emailmarketer/).This tool, which appears to be priced in a way that even small web and marketing agencies can afford, will now include the ability to split test different email campaigns. (By the way, I have no affiliation or relationship with Interspire.)

You can, for example, run the same email to three lots of 1,000 recipients, with just the subject line different for each group. You can then see which version gets the best response and use that subject line for a much bigger distribution.

This technique is nothing new of course. Direct mail specialists have done testing like this for a long time. But now, with email campagning in the reach of those with a fairly small budget, and especially with tools like this being launched, it has perhaps never been easier to check the effectiveness of our marketing materials.

Marketers now have the opportunity to insist that split testing is a core feature of any email campaign. Why send an email to 20,000 people without first doing some tests? Even a response rate improvement of a few percent could have a big impact on sales.