Marketing Experiments discusses reasons why running email news items related to the products or services you sell can generate a spike in sales.
Over a short period of time the media was covering a topic that related directly to the services being sold by one of our research partners.
We set up a simple test with two emails, both of which were written to drive clickthroughs to a site and convert leads into sales.
In Email A we wrote the sales copy within the context of the news story. And we specifically made reference to details of the story.
In Email B we used largely the same email copy, with just one significant change. We made no specific mention of the event, although we still alluded to "recent events in the news."
The essential difference between the two emails is that one mentioned the event by name, and the other didn't.
We tested our messaging on more than 337,466 opt-in email addresses, and compiled the results after 12 days.
Here are the results:
What You Need To UNDERSTAND: Email A (specifically mentioning the news story and events surrounding it) significantly outperformed Email B. CTR increased by 16.5 percent and overall conversion (email to sale) increased by 43.4 percent.
Given these results, you may want to use an alert service to inform you of relevant news stories, and be ready to quickly email your list, make changes to your homepage or build a landing page with traffic driven by PPC advertising with related headlines.
You'll find the full set of research results in the Marketing Experiments A/B Split Testing Brief.
The Marketing Experiments Journal publishes primary test results from work with our research partners once every two weeks. Subscription to the Journal is free and gives you full access to both our archives and teleconference calls. Subscribe here.