I am sure you all are aware that I am always on the lookout for new and innovative ideas on improving email marketing results. While on Twitter yesterday, I noticed a post by @mmallin which stated, "Twitter's probably a great place to test different subject lines for email marketing campaigns." At the time, I thought not a bad idea and I retweeted the message. Then a few questions came back to me about how this would be accomplished. So, I feel like this deserves more attention then 140 characters to share my thoughts.
One of the common uses for Twitter is to send links to your Followers to read an article, join a webinar, etc.. The challenge is always to provide a good call to action message that will get the Followers interested in clicking on the link you provided. This is the same challenge all email marketers face when writing a subject line. Twitter is a great place to hone your skills in this area.
Tracking the effectiveness of these messages is the next obstacle. If you have insight into the web analytics for the site you are sending them to, or you have visibility into the registration activity for a webinar you have invited Followers to, then it makes things a bit easier... but not perfect. For example, send a tweet with one message. Wait a day. Check the site traffic. Send another tweet with a completely different message but same objective. Which one performed better for you.
Now let's take it up a notch... By using your email marketing platform, send a message to just yourself with different tracking links for the same destination. Copy those links into different tweets with different messages you would like to test. The effectiveness of those clicks can be seen in real time within your email marketing platform. Whichever performs better, use it in the "real" message to your subscribers... Make sense? Great... Now take advatage of this idea to polish up those subject lines!
Thanks to Michael Mallin @mmallin for this idea. If you use this idea with success, I want to hear about it. If you have questions or other great ideas, share them with everyone by commenting on this post.
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Dan, this is an interesting idea, and one that I've heard other folks mention. There are two problems with this idea:
ReplyDelete(1) Twitter doesn't give you the appropriate level of control to truly compare the performance of the two "subject lines" because you can't segment your Twitter followers and you can't control for time/day delivery differences.
(2) More importantly, it makes the dangerous assumption that your brands' Twitter followers are the same as your email subscribers. In most cases these groups will have very different demographics, etc.
Twitter can definitely help you write concise, interesting messages, but I don't see much opportunity for learnings to be *directly* ported over to email messaging.
Chad-
ReplyDeleteGreat insight. This is something that was mentioned to me as well by @jewelss. Sometimes I have to pull myself out of my own world of how I use things and put myself in other's shoes. One other important fact that I did not mention in this is that a "tweet" is really only seen by the limited number of followers who are online at the time and paying attention to what you yourself are "tweeting." Another issue that provides for a less then ideal test ground.
None the less, it has the potential to provide limited learnings on how the better construct an effective subject line.