Success in mail delivery, maintaining contact with a potential customer, is achieved by understanding the interaction. The easiest way to trace this is with an experiment. As practice shows, this way of measuring is simple and gives an idea of how email deliverability works quite accurately. You can start with the simplest action to improve email deliverability.
Subscription – experiment and survey
This experiment will answer the most important question for newsletter developers: “Did you want to have the same experience with subscriptions and work with them?”. An outside view will always be more objective.
So, gather at least five different people and ask them to sign up for your email newsletter. They don’t have to be in a personal relationship with the experiment initiator. And they shouldn’t be brand focused. The easiest option is to gather them in different rooms and offer to do the subscription process. They should do it on their own and give a brief report in the form of questionnaire responses.
If possible, it would be a good idea to observe these actions from the outside as well. In such a questionnaire, a minimum of five items should be evaluated:
- how easy and clear the subscription procedure is;
- whether it is clear what the subscription itself is about and what benefits it will bring;
- how you can unsubscribe from the newsletter;
- what are the expectations from it;
- whether it needs to be modified and what kind of changes it needs to make.
It’s easy enough to assess the results by evaluation, and for non-evaluation answers – collect different data and summarize them in a table.
Virtual test: only the answers matter
Another way to investigate the quality of subscriptions is to track a target audience that is not familiar with the brand. Using special subscription management tools, such as Reply.io, you can track the response of a select small category of subscribers. To do this, the system selects from various sources potentially loyal to the brand people. And it is to this target group that a mailing is made, with offers to start a conversation.
A very precise instrumental analysis of actions is important here – whether the letter is discarded as spam, whether the subscriber is neutral, whether the subscriber is actively interacting, and so on. That is, you need to accurately assess as many characteristics of the user’s response as possible:
- time of response and opening of the email;
- the reasons why the email was sent to spam;
- the speed of reading or answering/rejecting the email, and much more.
Such measurements and obtained analytical data are systematized and express conclusions are made about the properties of the subscription itself.
Different people’s experiences: an experiment in the office
Another option is to evaluate the simplicity and ease of subscribing by different subscribers offline. And the organization of such a subscription can take place in one office with the duration of several hours. Here the task is easier – it is important to track how potential subscribers with different experience and level of involvement will do it.
It’s more convenient to make such a voluntary experiment with visitors, who will agree to it and get at least a minimal bonus for such attention to studying the mailing list.
