When I started in the data publishing business decades ago, information products were largely paper-based (think directories), and the selling of information products was largely paper-based as well (think direct mail). Fast forward to today, and now we’re mostly selling online subscriptions via online marketing, and everyone is better off for it, or so it would seem.
Yet in the great shift from offline to online marketing, what didn’t seem to shift over were all the people who really understood offline marketing. These people tended to know their stuff, for the simple reason that direct mail was expensive. Too many mistakes and you would be out of a job or out of business.
As a result, the development of online marketing canon was a tabula rasa exercise. I still vividly remember sitting in a seminar for online marketers in 1999 as the speaker described an extraordinary new marketing concept: in order to find the best price for his product, he had split his list in two and sent each half the same offer but with different price points. He said the concept could be used dozens of different ways, and because it was new there wasn’t even a name for it. As dozens of online marketers from household name companies furiously scribbled notes, I remember thinking that one possible name the group might want to consider was “A/B testing.” These young marketers were so convinced that what they were doing was so new and so different it never occurred to them to explore what had been learned before they arrived on the scene.
Sure, online marketing has come a long way in the last 20 years, and there are now aspects of online marketing that don’t have any offline parallel. But the basics live on.
In talking to the pricing research experts at TRC, folks whose deep knowledge of market research never fails to impress, I learned of a recent study conducted by researchers at Stanford and the University of Chicago. It sought to quantify the value of adding personalization to email messages. The results were stunning: the research found a 21% lift in email opens, a 31% lift in the number of inquiries, and as a bonus, a 17% drop in the number of unsubscribes. Online gold! But, just for the record, personalization delivered magical results in offline direct mail as well, so while these research results are good news, at the same time they’re not really new news.
Yet, one recent study finds that while 81% of online marketers claim they send personalized email, only 3% of consumers feel they regularly receive personalized email. The discrepancy comes from the difference between personalizing an email and effectively personalizing an email. The best online marketers know that there’s more to it than just dropping a name in the email somewhere.
How do you figure out what’s effective? Testing, endless testing, having a good research methodology (such as not testing multiple things in one email), and monitoring and recording results carefully. Not sure where to start? Well, you might consider this new thing – it’s called an A/B test.
This article is adapted from the InfoCommerce Blog
