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Email Marketing Case Study
Boosting Click-Through-Rates for a Digital Record Keeping Solution
10-Second Summary
My client, a platform that enables facility managers to organize their documents and itemize out their various legal processes, wanted to boost their marketing email CTRs. Through A/B testing and some creative thinking, we found a new method that increased CTR by 58%.
The Challenge
The landscape of building legislation, inspections, and documentation is constantly shifting and is often too complicated for facilities managers to navigate without a tool to help. My client, a platform that enables facility managers to organize their documents and itemize out the various legal processes associated with managing a building, serves as that crucial partner. A key part of my client’s overall strategy for nurturing new leads into marketing qualified leads is emphasizing the importance of adding the right tools to their tech stack by highlighting these frequent developments via marketing emails.
The issue they were experiencing, though, was that not enough recipients were clicking through to the website. My client tasked us with encouraging greater engagement among email recipients and growing traffic sourced from marketing emails.
The Solution
The frequent nature of legislative updates created plenty of opportunities to communicate with leads via email and, therefore, ample opportunities for A/B testing different methods of boosting click through rates (CTRs).
As open rates were strong we decided to, for the time being, make no changes to our approach to subject lines, preview texts, deployment times, and friendly-from names. To improve CTRs we focused our attention on the bodies of the emails.
Before this round of testing, the body of these emails typically featured a brief summary of the legislative update being discussed at the time, followed by call to action (CTA) prompting recipients to read the full piece of content on my client’s website.
Following weeks of testing, various iterations experienced marginal improvements to CTR compared to their control versions. While it showed encouraging progress, my client and I wanted something more substantial.
Over half a dozen emails, we tested a series of variables to the CTA and summary combination. This included changes to:
- CTA color
- CTA copy
- CTA location
- Length of email copy
For the next one, we decided to do something different. What if the key to engagement wasn’t in what we were showing them, but in what we didn’t show them?
Based on the hunch that readers would be more eager to engage if their thoughts were cut short, we directed our attention to the email body in which we summarized the legislative update. Instead of a summary, this time we included a preview image of the content, which included the first paragraph or so of copy.
"What if the key to engagement wasn’t in what we were showing them, but in what we didn’t show them?"
Instead of an abrupt cut-off, though, we faded the preview out toward the bottom until the text was illegible. Ideally, the recipient would begin reading, become frustrated when the sentence would be cut short, and click the accompanying CTA to receive the gratification of completing the thought by reading the rest on the website.
The Results
For the next email, we ran another A/B test. Version A following our typical format, and Version B being the new approach to pique reader interest.
After 24 hours to allow the data to mature post-deployment, we reviewed the difference in CTR. What we found was that Version B, which utilized the fading preview, received 58% more clicks than Version A.
Through consistent testing and a willingness to think outside the box, my client now has a new method of improving their email engagement rates and helping more prospects feel in control of their building management processes.
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