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!
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