Create the Perfect Email!

Now I know it may seem that emails are becoming a thing of the past, but they are still one of the most used and most effective marketing tools. There are plenty of great providers out there that you can use to really maximise the benefits of using email marketing. One that I recommend you using would be Mailchimp, for starters its free, but it offers a range of different templates and designs that you can customise to your needs.

The method of A/B testing is one that’s used widely across many businesses, and at first it can be quite tricky to get your head around, but online tools make it very simple and easy to do. So, I know some of you will be thinking “I’ve got no idea what you’re on about”, so let me think of the best way that I can give you a full detailed description of what A/B testing is, but I’ll try keep it to only a few sentences…

A/B testing is designed to allow you to send two emails to only a percentage of your customers, from this you will be able to determine which email has the better open rate or click rate. After a certain amount of time Mailchimp will then send the email that performed better to the remaining percentage of your customers. And then overtime you will be able to complete a number of different A/B tests to find the perfect design, template and subject that your customers will want to open. So essentially, you’re creating an email that your customers will want to open, which is great if you have any offers on that you want to get out to your customers. It can be quite a lengthy process, but if it gets more people into your salon, then it’s worth it! Well, I hope that’s sort of made a clearer picture in your head as to what A/B testing actually is.

Mailchimp offers a free service that will do all the sending work for you, all you’ll need to do is design the emails. It will ask you to select which part of the email you would like to test, this can be: subject line, from name, content and send time. You will then need to enter the percentage of your customers that you want to receive the test email, for example 30% would mean that 15% receive one email and the other 15% will receive a different email. You will need to select how the winning email will be determined, so this can be by the open rate or click rate or you can manually choose, and then enter the number of hours or days that you want to send the winning email out to the rest of you customers. Even just typing that out, having done some A/B testing in the past, I can see this being quite daunting if you’ve never done it before. But as I mentioned earlier, Mailchimp is a free service so you can do as many tests as you want before you actually begin to send them out to your customers, which I would definitely recommend doing just to make sure you know the exact steps on how to send you’re A/B test out.

Here’s an example of something you could do:

You could then wait a day or so and see which offer is bringing more customers in, and then you will be able to send out the winning email to the remaining percentage of customers who are yet to receive the offer.

I really recommend trying this method out to really maximise your offers and see what your customers want to see and what will get them into the salon. If it works then its worth putting in all the effort! Good luck!