If you’ve been involved in email marketing for any length of time, you’ll probably know that building a responsive subscriber base is a matter of attracting subscribers who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer, and sending them content that compels them to take the kind of action you want them to take.

Do both and you’ll experience relatively low unsubscribe rates, high open rates, high click-through rates and high conversion rates.

Sounds simple… but when it comes to providing the right content… what exactly IS the right content? Is it necessarily articles or sales promotions? Is it both? In what proportion? Should both articles and promotions appear in the same email (as in this newsletter) or should they be sent separately? Or should you send both kinds of emails? And, if so, when should you send each kind?

The answer is, of course, to test what works best with YOUR audience. But before you jump into testing… you need something to test. In general, I recommend modelling yourself on a business that is doing well. We have done that with Kikabink News and Success Accelerator which are both somewhat based on the newsletter + solo promotion model used by direct response marketing companies such as Agora, Inc. Then it’s a matter of surveying readers and testing things to elicit ever improving results.

So what kind of insights are you likely to get when you survey and test? Well, consider a recent MarketingSherpa case study about a pet supply company. The company split-tested sending an email with (a) a promotion (including image and copy) at the top of the email and a link to an article below the promotion, and (b) a link to the article at the top of the email with the promotion below. In both cases the article link was actually a hot-linked title (and an appealing title at that) which led to a page where people would see the (short) article, along with various promotions.

Interestingly, version (b) achieved 7 percent higher click-throughs and 6 percent higher sales conversions than version (a). In other words, not only did the article attract more click-throughs, but people who clicked-through to the article tended to buy more than those who simply responded to the ad.

Now this does NOT mean that all your emails should now contain a link to an article at the top, with a promotion below. There are still many, many variables – the target audience for one and the landing page for another – that impacted on the pet company’s results. But the results do support the idea that email subscribers value non-promotional content… and that if they believe you are giving them something of value by way of a helpful article, they will be more willing to buy from you.

Source: Case Study, “Test Content To Create Best Layout To Boost Email Revenue, Conversions, CTRs”, MarketingSherpa, November 5, 2008