Convirza is an advanced call tracking platform.
That’s the surface. Underneath, we are an analytics company. Customer intelligence. Conversation Analytics. Marketing Analytics. Big data.
We track calls so that agencies and advertisers can prove marketing ROI, know which campaigns work best, adjust and improve their advertising, generate more calls, and make more money. The tracked calls provide analytics.
As the marketing team for a marketing analytics company, we practice what we preach. Marketing analytics is part of our DNA.
We test, adjust, optimize, repeat.
Email conversions are counted in open rates and click rates, and then the conversion rate of the landing page.
The subject line plays a critical role in email conversion rate testing. One email marketing expert recently recommended to spend 50% of your time on the subject line, and 50% on everything else. That’s a lot of time on one sentence.
What is important to test with a subject line? With any A/B test, you want to keep things simple, one variable at a time. We’re testing email open rates first, then later we’ll do click rates. We have four different subject line A/B tests going on.
Which of the following will produce higher email open rates:
1) Including the recipient’s name in the subject line. (Example: “Mike, don’t miss this week’s webinar…” vs. “Don’t miss this week’s webinar…”)
2) Length of subject line. Most people say shorter is better.
3) Adding a quantity to the subject line. (Example: “6 Ways to Optimize Conversions with Call Tracking” vs. “Optimize Conversions with Call Tracking”)
4) In webinar invite emails, name dropping with big name guest presenters.
To be clear, we’re not testing these four against each other; each of the four is an independent test.
We started these tests 3 months ago with webinar invite emails to our list. Sorry list member friends, we’re experimenting on you.
Using recipient name in subject line:
Email 1: 18.5% open rate without name vs. 15.6% with name.
Email 2: 14.4% without name vs. 13.7% with name.
Email 3: 17.9% without name vs. 19.7% with name.
So far, it’s a 2 to 1 in favor of NOT including the recipient’s name. We won’t speculate at this time as to why this is the case. We’re just reporting results.
Shorter subject lines vs. longer subject lines:
Most email experts, including our favorite, MailChimp, recommend subject lines of 50 characters or less. So our experiment is subject lines under 50 characters and longer subject lines of over 50 characters.
Email 1: Short subject line had a 16.1% open rate. Longer subject line had a 13.8% open rate.
Email 2: 20.3% for short over 19.1% for long.
Email 3: 15.6% for short over 13.8% for long.
Email 4: 13.7% for short over 12.6% for long.
Clear winner there.
Quantities:
People generally like lists. “Top 10 Pick-up Lines,” or “8 Simple Ways to Get Better Leads with Call Tracking.” Our blog posts with quantities get good open rates, so we are experimenting to see if the same is true for email open rates. One email tested so far.
Email 1: “6 Ways to Optimize Conversions with Call Tracking” had a 14.4% open rate vs. “Optimize Conversions with Call Tracking” with a 14.2% open rate.
No clear winner. We’ll test more.
Adding the presenter’s name to your webinar invite:
We do marketing webinars with some hot-shot marketers. Will adding their name to the webinar invite get more people there? This is a tough test because it’s hard to determine overall clout that the person’s name carries, but we thought we’d test it out to see how it panned out. We love testing, so why not?
Email 1: 21% open rate with presenter name. 20.4% without.
Email 2: 19.2% with name, 18.5% without.
.6% and .7% differences. Nothing huge. We’ll keep testing.
We’ll continue our tests and update you when we have a significant amount of data.
