The Email Wars

I am sharing this campaign with you a little prematurely. Now I am not saying that this campaign has not gone out and did blow away the long running subscription control by a double digit factor, but it is getting a full campaign case study written up now. It will be out soon with all the details, but want I wanted to focus on was the slight factor that changed the response rate. 

When this creative was first passed by my desk I had to stop and think about it a little bit. How was it different from what was sent out prior? What would tell people what to do and would that effort beat that of ones prior? The whole idea of this campaign was to drive subscriptions and we did not want it to make people think of anything else besides the images and the value of having a print subscription. We loaded it up into an inbox to see how it displayed. Did it drive the eyes to the action. Did it convey value and on top of that did it make me want to get a subscription. Well it was close.

So what was the element that was missing? Well it was that the images of the magazines were taking my eye away from the action button. So what I suggested was to bring that button to life in a higher jewel tone color to make it POP but not steal from the magazines. We tested a few variations and then settled with the final image here. We loaded it back up and sent it to the inbox to see what we immediately saw, felt and understood. Done. We were happy that it would perform. Now tell you this might make you wonder how we knew it would work, as we had one shot at this test and we had only been given 3 days to make it happen. What a test, no pressure right? 

Well it went out and a few days later with the metrics came back we heard we had blown it away. Wow it felt good. There were high fives traded and a sense of accomplishment from the team that worked on it. 

What you can learn.

1. Working on the goal first can help you drive the creative approach in email. 

2. Loading the creative into a live inbox and seeing it in the environment it was meant for can tell you a lot in a short time prior to live testing. 

3. When you have been doing this as long as we have, trust your gut and go with what you know works. 

Look for the full case study to be released in a few weeks. It is the little changes that make the impact, not the sweeping changes in most cases.