Testing Email Marketing Templates For Your Marketing Campaign

Email marketing is one of the most ubiquitous and useful forms of internet marketing.  

Owning an email account in the 21st century is a near necessity; nearly every consumer has access to one or more email accounts. They're free, they're easy to use, and they're a great channel for us to target with our marketing campaigns.

Marketers rely heavily on coordinated email marketing campaigns in order to: develop strong positive relationships with their consumers, promote sales initiatives, share news with their subscribers, and showcase the quirks that make their company unique and relatable.

While email marketing is an effective marketing tool for any business, not all marketing email campaigns are created equal.

The best way to develop marketing emails lies with the creation of eye-catching, functional email template designs.

The most efficient way of developing engaging email marketing templates is to test your designs with an audience of customers.

Utilizing Helpfull’s surveying methodology, business owners and marketers can test their email template designs with a customer group catered to their target demographics. The ability to receive measured customer feedback on the fly allows for designers to integrate their audiences’ critique into their work in real-time. These designs ultimately make Helpfull the premiere tool for marketers of any kind.

Before we look at how Helpfull surveying can improve the effectiveness of your emails, let’s first look at:

Designing The Perfect Marketing Email Templates

The ease at which adverts can be sent through email marketing means that every business is fighting for valuable space in their consumer’s inbox.

Much like if we had a product sitting on a shelf in a store, we want our email to compete with the various other products and offers vying for the customer’s attention. Furthermore, once the consumer opens the email, the content must be thoroughly engaging - lest the recipient lose interest and move the advert into their trash folder.

When developing your email template designs, consider the following tips:

Create A Gripping & Memorable Email Marketing Subject Line

• For a detailed guide on creating an eye-catching email subject line, click here.
  

Establish Relevance

• Write in plain, simple terms as to why your customers should care about reading your email, i.e. A Big Sale, A Limited Time Offer
  

Write in the Second Person

• Utilizing “you” and “your” aids to draw the customers into your sales pitch by directly making it about them
  

Talk About Product Benefits, Not Features

• A feature is what a product does. A benefit is how that feature has a measurable impact on the life our customers. Talking about the latter is far more effective when selling a product.
  

Be Succinct and Brief

• Consumers will likely be turned off your email if they see large blocks of text. Keep it short and sweet when developing the meat of your email - include only the essentials.
  

Be You

• Customers will appreciate unique, creative email design and insights into the inner-workings of your organization. The more genuine your content appears, the more your consumers will identify with your brand and your mission.
  

Keep the preview text in your email design considerations. Preview text for an email showcases anywhere between 35 and 140 characters - any more than that, and your preview text gets cut off.

The visual structure of your email is paramount to the readability of your advert. Keep the style visually distinct, and ensure that your email does not appear cluttered or unreadable by your audiences.

To find the most effective email marketing template, it’s always best practice to create a series of mock-ups to test before your audiences.

Once you’ve developed a selection of different designs to consider, you’re ready to begin testing.

Survey #1 - Sales Announcement Templates

One of the most common forms of email marketing adverts utilized in business are sales promotions.

Sending out mass emails to a company’s mailing list is often one of the most efficient and immediate ways of introducing new sales offers.

For our first round of A/B testing, we’ve developed two different email marketing templates that showcase information about our new 50% off store-wide sale. We’re looking to keep our email marketing designs simple, bold, and eye-catching; our primary goal is to drive traffic to the website, so we need to keep the written text short and sweet.

After just 20 minutes, we were able to test our designs with an audience of 100 Helpfull panelists. 73% of the vote was reserved for the winning design - a template that utilized a far larger brand logo, more variety in font color, and a narrower design layout.

With such a large majority of our customers favoring one email marketing template over the other, we can be sure our winning design is going to be the most effective at drawing consumers to investigate our sale offers.

Survey #2 - Holiday Themed Templates

Utilizing special dates such as Holidays or a consumer’s birthday is one of the best ways to capture audience attention with your emails. The fact that so much of the retail industry revolves around seasonal deals or holiday promotions is a testament to just how much emphasis humans place on the importance of themed dates.

For our second survey, we’re looking to test the effectiveness of our holiday advertising templates. This time, we’re a retail fashion company looking to promote our winter sale with some holiday-themed email marketing campaigns.

Much like in our first survey, the Helpfull panelists were able to choose a definitive winner after just 20 minutes of deliberation. 61% of audiences tested found our “navy blue” email marketing template to be the most eye-catching and the most effective for our email campaigns.

While the other outlines were seen as either too cluttered or uninteresting, the winning template managed to draw audiences in with it’s bold design, invigorating color scheme, and its functionality. Audiences are drawn to designs that plainly and obviously state their purpose; “25% Off Store-Wide Sale” stands out in the body of our email, and it’s also very attractive to consumers from a financial perspective.

Survey #3 - Newsletter Templates

Email newsletters are one productive way any organization can develop deep, intimate relationships with their consumers.

The subscription-based nature of email marketing ensures that only consumers who have at least some interest in your company or it’s products will receive your adverts. Deepening that relationship with your consumer ensures they will feel more enthusiastic about interacting with your company; creative and consistent email marketing can spur them to engage with your marketing campaigns further down the line.

For our last set of surveys, we wanted to test the effectiveness of our newsletter template designs. We’ve taken on the role of Nature’s Mark - a theoretical organization dedicated to producing Eco-friendly, sustainable stationery products.

With three unique email templates to test, we once again ask our Helpfull panelists to decide which email marketing template design they find the most effective and memorable.

Outshining the two email marketing templates that showcased traditional stationery products, our natural “wooded” design was overwhelmingly preferred by our test audiences.

In marketing, developing strong brand associations in the consumer's mind often requires thinking outside of the box. The email marketing templates that broadly showcased our products were found to be less effective than the email showcasing a mysterious wooded forest - for predictable reasons.

The foggy forest graphic and the words “Earth Saver Initiative” were far more effective at eliciting a strong emotional response from our consumers than the other adverts. By inviting the consumers to purchase our products - and therefore, benefit the planet - we’re engaging them on a much deeper psychological level than we would be otherwise.

Ultimately, the winning newsletter design achieved its goal of engaging consumers in a positive way and deepening their emotional connection to our brand - therefore, we’ll run with it in our email marketing campaign.

Develop Effective Email Campaigns With Helpfull Feedback

Email is an essential marketing channel for any business operating in the field of e-commerce. The ability to quickly and intimately market to an audience of your most loyal consumers allows for businesses large and small to advertise themselves more cheaply and effectively than with other traditional marketing tools.

The best and most affordable way business owners can generate quality, reliable consumer feedback is through conducting consumer response surveys. A simple survey could be all that stands between your company and the renewed success of it’s online marketing efforts.

With Helpfull’s open-ended survey design, users can design visually-striking, multi-question surveys for any occasion!

Helpfull’s community of panelists are ready and waiting to give you concise, constructive feedback on any topic: branding, art, product development, photography, interior design, travel advice - even advice on how you should dye your hair. The feedback that Helpfull generates is displayed in clear, visually distinguishable comments right there on the survey launch page. Whether you’re choosing from either pre-formatted question templates or designing the survey from scratch, you’re only a few button presses away from getting hundreds of unique responses from real consumer panelists.

The responses gathered by Helpfull surveys display in real time, allowing you to instantly incorporate the feedback you receive into your designs.

An intuitive user-interface, coupled with the ability to gather hundreds of consumer responses in just minutes, are just a few of the features that make Helpfull the ultimate tool for any artist, designer, marketer, or inquisitive spirit.

Get the feedback you need to succeed - sign up with Helpfull today, and get surveying within minutes!