17th Jan 2008
Does this technique work
The biggest challenge when sending out a message is getting your reader to respond. That applies to email messages, advertising, direct mail letters and other marketing approaches.
That is the essence of the question Martin Russell from www.wordofmouthmagic.com sent in:
Q: “You send out blog notification emails with a bit of the post in it, so is there any evidence for which is better; title only, part of post, full post?”
A: I got my training on ‘how to create a blog’ from Ed Rivis’ programme on business blogging for profit. And, initially, I followed his email notification style of sending just the title of the post.
However, I noticed that in email notices I received from Dan Kennedy for his marketing newsletters, he always included the start of his article. Sometimes this intrigued me enough to go and have a look, sometimes it didn’t.
And I wondered if giving a bit more of an idea of what a post was about would encourage more of my blog subscribers to visit. Effectively act as a teaser…
So I decided to test this and changed the notification style of my emails (if you’ve been a subscriber for some time you probably noticed the difference). It is still early days yet but the figures are showing an interesting trend. My average number of daily visitors has increased by 31.65% since sending the new style notice.
Now this is not scientific testing because the topics are different so it is not really a fair comparison. I shall check the average again after a few more weeks.
As regards sending the full post in the email, I’m not too keen on that approach. Not because I’ve tested anything - purely a personal thing because:
- I would have to be more careful about the wording I use in the post to avoid triggering spam filter programs, which could prevent my messages getting through to you.
- It would make some of the emails extremely long and I prefer to let you decide if you want to visit to read the full content.
- If you got the full post in the email, you’d have no reason to visit this blog website. It would be more like an ezine newsletter. The idea of the website is to create a relationship, with the chance for you and I to interact. When you visit to read the post you can use the comment link to respond if you want to; effectively continuing the conversation I’m starting.
- As this blog site grows, I’ll be adding links to useful products I’m developing. If you never have any reason to visit you won’t see the links and could be missing out on something that is important to you and your business.
So, on that basis, I don’t have any plans to test sending the full post message.
What are your thoughts?
Do you prefer to have an email showing just the post title? Or do you like having the introductory text that gives a hint of what the post is about?
I’d like to know your opinion - post your 2p’s worth using the comments link below.
~ Carol Bentley
Hi Carol,
The one I prefer the most is the one you tell me results in most traffic! Look forward to hearing the results of your testing.
-Ed.
There are a few problems with this.
1. The Hawthorne Effect - any change is likely to improve response, just because you changed. It may not be a response to the particular change itself.
2. The long-term training of readers. Training them to decide whether to click through or not based on what you write in the first bit may make it difficult in future.
3. All the points you identify for the full post, still apply to some extent for part posts.
How about a standard vanilla announcement, but with occasional variations to keep people on their toes.
Ahh, the limits of scientific testing