A recent A/B e-mail campaign test pitted a multiple product image mailer against a single-image mailer. The experiment resulted in a dead heat!

Sales Renewal creates holiday-themed emails for the Concord Flower Shop – about six per year. Typically, the emails feature nine to 12 floral arrangements with multiple options for the recipients to click through to the website and purchase. (The image, the description and a “Select” or “Learn More” button are all hyperlinked to the products on the site.) The results consistently compare favorably to Constant Contact’s benchmark standards for opens and clickthroughs, and either meet or exceed the industry standards.

For Valentine’s Day, after discussion with our client, we prepared an e-mail campaign to test our standard design against a more simple, single-image mailer. Since multiple factors can affect an email’s results, we kept the remaining controllable factors – subject line and time of day sent – the same. We also attempted to remove any list bias by dividing the list via random number selection.

Well, the results are in, and both emails win! Some highlights of the test:

• Both emails resulted in an equal number of direct sales
• The single image version generated more clicks
• The multi image version generated a higher conversion rate (percent of clicks that led to a sale)
• The single image generated higher sales dollars

How will we use these results? Other than understanding that people tend to wait until the last minute to buy their holiday flowers and that sending an email – no matter what the layout – is helpful in getting them to make their purchase (most of the sales came on February 13 and February 14), we now have two strong formats that we can use for future holidays, ensuring we can keep the recipients engaged and our communications fresh and varied.

Are you using e-mail as part of your online marketing efforts? Are you testing your format? Subject line? Time of day and day sent? Let us know the results!

– Audrey Trieschman