Proof: Guessing Gets You Nowhere

By: Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services

Forget experience, gut feelings and opinions. Turns out that the intuition of marketers was completely unreliable in predicting the best performing creative for online, email and search marketing. Results from this Marketing Experiments Lab are posted online.

What's an email marketer to do? One word: TEST.

All day long our Strategy Group works with marketers to apply best practices to their retention and acquisition emails. We pour over past campaign data and click analysis, track competitors, review audience behavior and test actionable subject lines. We certainly consider our gut and past experiences, but what really matters is hard core data that can only be gleaned from testing. Relying on what you "think" will work means little, as Marketing Experiments found -- intuition was totally off in predicting the best response to offers, subject lines, headlines and design.

Just another reminder that email is a direct marketing medium, and is most effective when we let our customers and subscribers tell us what they like.