This past weekend I attended a marketing conference with a whole heap of powerful online and direct marketers.  It was fantastic to see and share marketing strategies with other pros.

One thing jumped out at me was how casual they were about email marketing…

… yet at the same time email marketing was the cornerstone of THEIR marketing campaigns.

Many of them even shared some of their list-building strategies.

But one piece of advice came up over and over again.  Test your strategies to ensure you get the best results.

Focus on email marketing tests – the rewards are huge!

Here’s an example of what I mean.  Midway through my email marketing career, I was responsible for a product launch to our list using email.  We had about 500,000 subscribers on our list and about 100,000 customers that we made promotional offers to each month.

Over the year this channel directly and indirectly generated about 45% of our revenue.

We had released a new membership site and were now ready to introduce it to our list to pump up the member list.

We went through the motions and went through our launch sequence (like we always do) and sent our test message (like we always do).

And we were shocked by what we saw.

After our first test we had sales of about a dozen memberships.

We were plain out right terrified! There was no way we could release this to our entire list because it would mean this would have been our single worst launch… EVER!

Just not acceptable.

So we rounded up the troops.  Our top copywriter, our senior editor, our email specialist, our team leader and we sat down with our stats.

mp900427658***Important note here:  make sure you trust your stats.  Just like a pilot learns to trust their instruments.  We loved this product.  Our beta members raved about it.  But the stats said it wouldn’t sell if we launched it.***

Then we did two things that changed everything.

1.  We moved the official launch date back by 10 days.  (Our CEO hit the roof over this one)

2.  We started a disciplined testing process to find out where our sales process was broken.

Here’s what we tested:

1. We tested subject lines to get the highest open rates.

2. We wrote new copy for the email and tested new email copy.

3. We tested our call to action text and our use of buttons and links.

4. We tested our landing page.

At every stage we made improvements in the conversion rates.

By the end of our testing period as we approach the launch, we then send a test version of the announcement against our control (the previous version that failed so badly)

What did we find?

We got a 12 times improvement in sales!

That’s correct.  Instead of a launch that would have sold around 120 members, we sold over 1,400 new members.

One of our greatest potential launches turned into one of our single BEST launches.

Why?

Because we tested.

Take these two pieces of advice.

1.  Make sure you know how to run a split test (ideally your software does it for you automatically)

2.  Make sure you actually run split tests.  Do one per month. After a year you may know 12 more things about your list abilities than you knew before.