Ask any successful veteran direct marketer and they will talk your ear off about how testing is one of the most important disciplines. Ask any email marketer how often they test more than subject lines and they will tell you that they rarely have the time. Worse, many marketers are not doing any testing or have not established clean control groups to evaluate what is working or not working. In turn, most marketers are relying on gut-driven subjective decisions (opinions) instead of objective (data-driven) enhancements.

Stop gambling with your email program profitability. Test, test, test to get smart about what works and what doesn't -- and remember, you are never completely "done." As I shared in a past article, titled, "10 Quick Wins for Email Marketing," what worked well for you last year might not work now. Testing should be done daily and sustained by incorporating key fundamental practices into your standard email operating procedures or processes.

Below are five focus areas to help you get started today:

1. Choose a winner (lift revenues): Start by focusing your test efforts on an email campaign or program that is most likely to result in significant lifts in revenues. Often it's best to start testing on the emails that are making you the most money or are reaching the highest volume of customers. Said simply, focus your limited attention on what will have a big impact.
2. Find a control (past performance): Before engaging in any test efforts, be sure to document your current metrics to establish a baseline to improve upon. Additionally, always include a randomized hold-out group by isolating a small percent of your list size that will be not be affected by any items you are testing (i.e., control group). This will allow you to clearly prove the increase resulting from your test efforts and will come in handy when recognizing accomplishments (e.g., when discussing why you need more head count to test more often or your future promotion).
3. Create a test plan (one-off versus a program): All too often marketers get on a testing kick where they will get motivated and engage in A/B split testing for a few weeks and feel as though they have "tested." This is no different from a Southbeach diet when you lose a few pounds and start feeling good only to gain it back again months later. Testing, like eating healthy, needs to be part of a daily routine, and a formal test plan will help you stick with the program.
4. Start with subject lines (every email): All marketers should be doing A/B subject line testing in every email campaign. However, most emails that get out the door fail to include even a simple A/B split test. This is simply unacceptable, especially when considering that subject line testing alone can result in up to 50-60 percent clickthrough rate increases. Why? Because an email that doesn't get the attention of your customers gets deleted. Start A/B split test for subject lines on a small subset of your total addressable market; then roll out to larger segments within 24 hours.
5. Analyze results (winning factors/variations): It's surprising that so many RFPs for email software always include the importance of reporting capabilities. Yet, after signing on board with your email service provider, few marketers spend more then 10 hours per month logging in to use basic or advanced reporting functions to gain insights on what is and is not working. Though technology does the heavy lifting, a marketer's expertise is essential to analyze, architect, implement and continually refine one-to-one marketing programs. These days you must do your homework to pinpoint and address the points of failure that are causing leaks in your sales funnel conversion pathway. No one said it would be easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it. However, the companies that are investing in this area are getting smarter and smarter everyday. If you don't get in action soon, know that your competitors are or soon will.

This is your wake up call! The time to execute and advance the sophistication of your test efforts is now. While the majority of marketers are still stumbling with infrequent or poorly executed A/B split test efforts, the advanced marketers are light years ahead. They are using advanced test methods like multi-variant testing to rapidly accelerate their insights on how to optimize KPIs and email performance metrics. From my 10 years of email marketing, I can't disclose much in this area due to client confidentiality agreements. However, I will say that herein is your answer to "cracking the code" for accurately forecasting and meeting or exceeding your numbers each year. For a best-in-class example of advance testing, see the Senerata Flowers example below.

As you can see there are plenty of low-hanging fruit ready for harvesting -- simply adhere to this list. Engage in a healthy discussion with your in-house team, agency and email service provider to prioritize which of the aforementioned quick wins are right for you. Make one or all of them a reality to secure quick wins this year.

Questions? Comments? Opinions? Requests? Results? Comment below or contact me.