Wow…so it’s been a little while since I’ve added a post. What can I say…work has been hectic.

It is known that if you target your email, you are increasing the relevancy of each interaction with your customers. The question becomes “At what cost?”. Is there some benefit to sending someone a dog email who has stated or purchased only cat products? Okay, that one may be obvious, but what do you do in the case of apparel. For example, would you send an email promoting bikinis to someone who has only purchased jeans in hopes of converting them. If you are only creating one email and do not plan on segmenting your list, is it better to not send the bikini email to a customer who purchased only jeans?

If we specifically ask customers to give us their preference, do we only make them mad by sending them something else in hopes of converting them to purchase a product which they initially have no interest in?

Or, do we rely on our analytics tools and purchase history and target our customers based on this data. This allows us to be pro-active in anticipating the behavior of our customers without asking the customer to provide one bit of data. Is this then not an added bonus for a customer when they realize they received an email for a pair of shoes that are on sale which just happen to match the top they purchased last week?

This is a constant struggle we as email marketers are faced with. We see the data…we run the tests. But how do we know for sure. How are you segmenting your data?

Better yet, do you A|B test? If so, why not? You should be. You should be continuously testing. Whether it be as simple as a variation in a headline or whether you simply change a an image on a landing page. You will be surprised to find out that some enhancements or ideas that you think are the greatest thing since sliced bread will turn out to be hurting your site performance. If you are an e-commerce site, you should be without a doubt testing as your business depends on the customer being able to complete a transaction.

What is A|B testing you may ask. It is a simple test of 2 variables to see which performs better. Your metrics for success could be different depending on what you are going after. If you are trying to increase your mailing list size, obviously the number of email addresses you collect will be your metric of choice. On the other hand, if you are attempting to decrease your checkout abandonment rate, you metric could be a conversion number of those customers who entered checkout over those customers who completed checkout. There are further variations on this which is known as multivariate testing. This is a test of more than one variable on a particular page. A little bit more difficult to test and measure, but it allows you to get the most out of a test.

The information you gather from these test results will be invaluable. It is a great study in customer behavior and a great way to introduce usability testing to your business. The key to everything is you must determine the items that you feel will be actionable for each test. No sense in testing something and not doing something about it.

Here are some ideas to get you started…

• Landing Page headline
• Color/location/size of an “add to cart” button
• Location of search
• Location of a newsletter signup
• font color/size used on your pages
• Checkout process (for e-commerce sites)

There is so much more to take into consideration before you begin testing. I suggest thinking about what aspects of your website you can test and how it might apply to the type of site you maintain. I’ll try to add more as time goes on. Start with some focus groups or usability studies. Get some of your customers together to talk about the challenges they face on a daily basis. Not able to reach out to your local customers, try surveying them.