Know-How Exchange : Strategy

The bigger question here may be what are you testing? Headlines, Subject lines? Body copy? Offers? Colors? Typefaces? Images? Deadlines? Upsells? Actions?

Another question is of the 1 percent that clicked, how many of those people then bought?

I don't have a specific answer, but it may depend somewhat on the size of your universe. It will also depend on the confidence level you require for statistical significance.

Without knowing specifics, my gut says that 10,000 for the second mailing should be sufficient. The only reason you might want more is if you want very small differences to be statistically significant at a high level of confidence. If your second mailing gets, say, a 5.1% open and a 0.9% CTR, would you be willing to accept that it's not a significant difference at the 95% confidence level?

Kolterman

you are testing the "offer". Yet you are asking for basic advice on split testing - now let us get one thing straight here. You have a 5% open rate - there is real room for improvement here. Even a 1% improvement would mean a SIGNIFICANT improvement in those clicking your offer.

That means you need to get your mails opened - and not spammed. With 11m. emails you have a lot of room!!

Test the headline/title to get more opened.

I presume you are only mailing one offer. That is a pity because with an email series you can build trust, lay out what you do and how you do it. More importantly you can tell them what you are not! By the time the readers get to the end of the series, they will have seen a lot more of you and will be willing to listen. The big advantage is that they will have learned a great deal.

The other side is that you can get to know who your best customers are. Why broadcast to 11 million people when you can broadcast to 1 million and save all that energy!! - - - oh, and you don't p*ss anybody off either. With 11 million you can segment to your heart's content. Should you be firing shotguns, why not shoot with a rifle? They cost the same, the effect is dramatic.

Once you have sorted that little lot out, then is the time to work on your offer! The other thing to note is what you are testing. It is very easy to get wrong. In the words of Glenn Livingstone "most test two ideas twenty times" where you need to "test twenty things two times"!! Make sure that your split test really is different. Markedly different.

With all this info, you can start finding out what these 11million want. I live in Holland, 11m is half our population! There are a lot of people with very different lifestyles. The point is that you can find things that they want to buy that you had never thought of before.

My question to you is what you want to test with 11milion emails. I am sure these emails are just bought and not been collected through organic process.

Your all test are not relevant. Now a days, no one opens emails until they know who is sending them a mail, rest all follows later.

Now regarding your statistical approach of every things remains perfect, sounds good only in books, in real world specifically in email marketing, statistics differ because of rest of the things only and not because of the size of your database.

Hope this gives you a little direction.

Nishant Manchanda

If you are sending email at a time to 11 million people. There is more chances to mark spam, may not be delivered to all because all email ids not valid. bounced email, if 1% click recorded then it is very difficult to say how much conversion rate. May be your title is not so compelling to read. Suppose you are normal user and number of emails coming in your inbox how much emails you read. Do you read spam inbox mostly chances less. so need to write a compelling title and description. If you are sending emails to 100 people, chances are 20% to read and 10% interested and need details but the conversion is 3 to 5%. so do wisely.