7 effective A / B testing with welcome letters

The growing popularity of email newsletters is a consequence of their effectiveness. To use this tool 100%, it is necessary to carry out serious training. For example, deal with how to greet a potential customer. This, it turns out, is not so simple. Welcome letters to customers - the key to success for all relationships. Text, design, submission time, and structure affect whether customers become active, buy more. Earlier we reviewed tips on time, frequency, urgency, personalization, calls for targeted action, in this same article we want to talk about how you can (and should!) Test your letters of welcome. Experience is shared by Peter Tanham, who has extensive practical experience in testing, which gave results ..

When it comes to optimizing the conversion, we usually begin to optimize the top of the sales funnel and work with traffic - changing the time of posting on social networks, calls to action, headlines and images on the landing pages.
However, after we achieve maximum CRO (conversion rate optimization) in these areas, we should not dwell on this and work with the lower parts of the sales funnel.

Why?
People who have gone through the first step and declared themselves your potential customers by subscribing to the newsletter or registering for a free trial version are very valuable for your business. And a series of timely and well-written letters can be a really powerful tool with which you will welcome new users and turn them into regular customers.

A / B testing can help you optimize your welcome emails — however, this involves more extensive research than just checking the line with the subject line.
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Here are 7 effective A / B tests that should be done to optimize your welcome emails.

1. Testing the time and frequency of sending

A new user has just signed up for a free 14-day trial. Now you have 14 days to be interested in and converted into a paying customer with the help of your service and e-mails.
• How many letters do you send?
• One per day? A bit like spam, isn't it?
• One per week? Users will probably forget who you are after the second letter.
• Hmm, why not send five letters on the first day? Or three in the first three days, and then none in a week?

As soon as you start asking such questions, you will understand that these are just assumptions about the optimal frequency of emails.

And very often your assumptions that you send letters too often, or, conversely, too rarely, are quite far from the truth. That's where the good old A / B testing is good.

How to test the frequency of shipments?

The idea: “Why don't we send 5 letters on the first day?” Is the same thing as throwing a little spaghetti on the wall and looking at whether they stick or not. Of course, you may notice a slight increase in conversion, but this is unlikely to teach you anything.

A much more effective approach is to start with a hypothesis!

Knowledge: Users who register for our free trial want to solve a problem that is relevant to them. It is so urgent and urgent that it is the number 1 item on their to-do list for this week. They will be able to evaluate our service and competitors' product over the next 48 hours, and will try to work with the service for the next 72 hours for the first time.

Hypothesis: the active sending of welcome messages in the first 72 hours will be relevant and timely for users - this will contribute to an increase in conversion.

The hypothesis is based on knowledge and is easy to test. Perfectly.

This is better than the spaghetti option, as this approach will help you determine the ideal time to send a letter, and also it will allow you to get to know the users better. As an added bonus: the test results will allow you to learn something new that can help in the creation of new hypotheses and further testing and experiments.

Do not try to guess how many welcome messages should be in your thread. Test and let subscribers solve this.

2. Testing the Urgency Element
Testing the time of sending messages is the first big step that you need to go through, however, after that you need to start testing the content contained in your emails.

Instead, let's look at the tactics that many companies use in their e-mails to increase conversion: adding an element of urgency.

Mention of time constraints in your welcome emails can make users hurry and encourage them to act now.

How does Doggyloot use the urgency effect?

See what happened when Doggyloot tested the urgency effect in their e-mails, which were sent after the user left the basket abandoned - that is, interrupted the process of making a purchase. In the screenshot below you can see: it is written in the letter that “the goods you added to the basket are almost all sold”.



When they evoked a sense of urgency among their clients and used a clear call to action, the letters significantly increased Doggyloot's monthly earnings.

Every time I want to optimize a series of automatic e-mails, I often experiment with urgency. As a rule, in the early stages, this leads to a significant increase in conversion.

How to test urgency?

If you are not sure where to start, you can test the urgency element of your letters by sending e-mails with a reminder during different time periods.



Test the letter with the text “Your trial period is almost over” with intervals of 48, 24 and 12 hours.

A few things you should know before starting:

• Always include a control group that does not receive the letter you are testing. It will let you know that any email reminder — regardless of time — is better than none. It also allows you to isolate and measure the effect of each e-mail on the conversion rate.
• The number of test variations should depend on the number of new registrations. If few users are registered, start with two variations and use the statistical significance calculator. I usually spend testing over two to three weeks, while I count the number of variations so that each of them gives me about 100 conversions (registrations).

3. Testing personalization

Doggyloot achieved great success with email marketing in part because they conducted tests aimed at personalization and segmentation, which were based on one parameter that is very important for dog owners: the size of toys (small, medium and large).
This is very important, because the owners of Chihuahuas are unlikely to buy their toy for St. Bernard, because it will be more than the dog itself!



These three chewable duck legs are hardly suitable for Chihuahua.
Segmentation of letters based on these data allowed us to get quite impressive results. It was found that e-mails that were aimed at owners of large dogs received a CTR of 410% above average.



This data was so useful that now the only question that they ask a new user on the home page of the site (in addition to the email) is “What size is your dog?”

On the form on the left it says: “What size is your dog?”
Knowing and competently using the data on the recipient of the letters, you can significantly improve the conversion rate using e-mails.

How to test personalization?

What other personal data can you experiment with when creating a welcome letter?
• You can start with details that are easy to learn - for example, name, date of birth and company name.
• You can also experiment with information that is not so easy to get — location, type of device used, or level of use of your product.
• If you want to try something more advanced, try using personalization based on an advertising campaign that will attract users, a keyword that they are looking for, or a landing page on which they have registered.

All these data can be very fruitful to test. The main thing is to start. And conduct experiments.

Want to make welcome letters a little more welcome? Test personalization and segmentation!

4. Test your feedback request.

In early 2012, I read an article by Derek Halpern that allowed me to write the most effective letter I have ever written.
In this article, Derek recommends attracting new users (or blog subscribers) using an automatic e-mail containing one simple question:

"What is your problem?"

Since his post was published, I have used this technique over and over again - and I realized that it is really effective.

How does Groove ask for feedback?

Customers who have already committed a targeted action, as a rule, have valuable information that they can share with you. In the case of my SaaS company, the following questions were justified: “What is your biggest problem as a marketer you are facing right now?” The answers play a huge role in shaping our product plan.

Groove, a SaaS customer support company, began asking a similar question in their confirmation email to those who subscribed to the trial version:

Groove asks new users: “Why did you register with Groove?”



This automatic writing has proven its worth:
"The response rate to this email is 41%, and it allowed us to understand our business better than any e-mail we have ever sent."

Here are some answers they received:





Answers to the letter that they received in Groove helped them to create messages that they use on their landing pages and home page.

They used these answers to improve their marketing messages, which ultimately doubled the conversion rate on their home page.

They also have an interesting note about the timing of the response to the message they tested:

“What is interesting, we found that the answers to the question differed significantly among those customers who responded to it immediately after registration, and those who used Groove a week or longer. After a few days, the answers begin to focus more on specific functions of the application.
For this reason, we found it important to ask the question right away so that the decision in the user's mind is still fresh. ”

Asking potential customers for feedback is fine, but you will learn more about them if you first test what and when you ask.

Customer feedback is very important, however, first think and test what and when you ask.

5.Test the provision of unexpected benefits.

In the past, when I worked in the field of marketing consulting, I had many clients among musicians and record company employees. Some artists had a large list of contacts for which they did a monthly newsletter.

As a rule, everything went smoothly, but there was one problem: regardless of whether you were a fan of this musician for 10 days or 10 years, the same letter was sent to you. And, since most of the users have long been on the mailing list, the content, as a rule, was focused on old fans, which frightened off new subscribers.
When we decided that the new subscribers were important too and started sending them a welcome letter, the results were simply astounding.

Instead of receiving a stream of informational letters every month, each new fan received a series of e-mails that introduced him to the artist, and, ultimately, formed some kind of emotional connection with him. After several weeks, new subscribers had the opportunity to support the artist by purchasing a new disc or merch.



With one Irish performer, we began by testing various motivating factors that we could implement before asking for support. If we could send subscribers one letter 24-48 hours before asking to buy a disk or something else, what type of e-mail would be most effective and would motivate users to take a targeted action?

Something like social proof, a demonstration of how thousands of other fans enjoy this music? Or a reminder that people who buy the disc are very supportive of the artist?
It turned out that the most effective motivator (who subsequently doubled the purchase ratio) was an unexpected gift.

Approximately four weeks after subscribing to the newsletter, the fan received an unexpected letter, in which there were three free acoustic songs specifically for subscribers and a personal letter from the artist.



It was a real gift - it did not depend on any user actions, it seems to me that this was the reason for its success.
It was just nice.

And the people who received this gift were twice as likely to buy an album or t-shirt when they were asked about it two days later.
This is true for any business.

I saw how subscribers were sent free e-books, useful reports, or simply offered “free” access to the old webinar. Why this works can be explained in terms of psychology (gifts are motivated to repay the same). However, it is very important to know how unexpected joy encourages a customer to buy something from you is much more likely.

6. Test the design of the letter

We already know how important the subject of the e-mail and the content it contains. However, what about the design of the letter?
Should the welcome e-mail look like a catchy newsletter? Or should one prefer a less vivid design using branded colors, a logo and several product images? What about plain text e-mail without branding and design as such?



Should the welcome letter be catchy and full of images, be more relaxed and include several elements of your brand, or should it consist of text and only text? The only way to find out is to test.

Testing the design of the letter

The Obama team that organized the 2012 campaign found that the e-mails that can be most effectively earned should be individually tailored in plain text format.

This is what Amelia Showwalter, director of analytics for the Obama team, said about this: “It seems to me that this created the impression that these letters are written by real people, that they are not" focused on focus "to death. Such e-mails are more like impromptu. ”

On the other hand, Wishpond recently wrote about testing, the results of which showed the opposite.
They studied the study, according to the results of which “67% of users believe that clear detailed images are much more important than product information and customer ratings,” so they decided to test it in their e-mails.

As a result, they found that letters with CTR images are 60% higher than e-mails consisting only of text.
Keep in mind, I used the example of these two opposite cases not to confuse you!
I used them to illustrate that you cannot fully trust your intuition, industry standards, or what your competitors are doing. You can only conduct testing.

What emails do you send to clients? Maybe it's time to test something new ?!

7. Testing the ability to return the client

What to do when your potential client's free trial period is over? What if you sent him timely, personalized, and valuable greeting messages, but he still didn’t take a targeted action and become your client?
The fact that he has not done this yet does not mean that he is not interested in what you are offering. To return the user back is quite possible.

How Squarespace returns its users

Let's look at two emails that Squarespace sends to users who haven't moved from a trial version to a paid version.

This is the first email that is sent two days after the end of the free trial period, offers another seven additional days to try again to attract the user - a good combination of urgency and attempts to return the client.



The topic of the second letter, which comes a few days later, is the question “What could we improve?” Although there is a request for feedback in this letter, it also provides the user with the opportunity to extend the trial period and return.



How Groove returns its users

Groove is also experimenting with letters designed to return users, as part of the adaptation of potential customers.If the user has not yet performed the target action, they send emails 7, 21 and 90 days after the end of the free trial.

It seems that 90 days is too long a time (will users even remember about the existence of Groove?) - however, as testing has shown, these emails steadily increase conversion by 2%.
Not a large-scale increase, but only 2%. But this is better than the 0% that you would get if you let your customers go forever.

At what point do you finally abandon your potential customers? Maybe it is time to test and return users via e-mail?

Is there a hypothesis? We will test!

No need to completely copy someone's successful tactics, better catch inspiration and conduct large-scale testing of your welcome messages.

First you need to find out something about your customers - using support letters or simply asking users what causes them difficulties. This understanding will help you create a hypothesis about what you need to add to your emails so that they motivate users, break down unnecessary barriers and encourage potential customers to act quickly.

If you combine a landing page that you have been working on for a long time, with the same well-designed series of welcome letters, you will find that the conversion will increase significantly. However, the only way to make your welcome emails truly effective is to start testing today. You can use Mailchimp, AWeber or SparkPage to create your first series of welcome letters - each of these services has free trial versions.

So do it!