What’s a split test (aka A/B test), you ask? Imagine you have a deployment scheduled but you just can’t decide which one to send. It could be a different subject line or a different image in the sweet spot of the email, but something’s distinctively different. But you can’t decide which one to send because THEY ARE BOTH THAT AWESOME.

Well, split test it and send both! See which one performs better by sending out to equal parts or a small percentage of your list and then based on the winner, deploy to the rest of the group. Both options are available in SendLabs with a ‘winner’ determined by either open rates or clicks: your choice.

Basically, it’s the equivalent of a newspaper ad in which you can test two headlines or a magazine that isn’t sure what supermodel will sell more on the cover. No other industry and marketing medium allows you this flexibility. It’s so easy to do and can tell you a ton about what is moving the meter with your list.

I am working on a case study for our new friends at Wood Pellets.com about some split testing they had us do a few weeks ago. They had a campaign that we sent over five days and we used split testing on Tuesday-Thursday, using Monday and Friday to set the open rate standards (I call them campaign open and close metrics) for the week. After one day, we’d put the winner up against a new subject line that was more generic or specific and so on to the next day. This rolling effect ensured that we always were picking the hottest one based on that previous day’s result.

Obviously, the list or offer can have huge effects but the numbers don’t lie. Think about it: you could test with a small sample group for every campaign and if a campaign bombs with them, change it before you waste your time with the rest of your list.

The result with Wood Pellets? With nine campaigns, they had five hit open rates of more than 25% – peaking at over 30% for a few. Four of their campaigns had click-throughs in the double digits. In other words, what we did worked by looking at the daily open rates based on the subject lines in our split tests.

Need help? Ask us. There’s no excuse for you not to be doing this and realizing huge success.

This month was an exceptionally busy one for us here at SendLabs. Don’t expect this much every month.


New Platform

In the next few days, SL users will be logging into http://marketer.sendlabs.com or a custom domain if you are an agency partner instead of the old http://sl7.sendlabs.com. We’re seamlessly putting all of our customers on a revised architecture that will allow for more scalability and more rapid development of features moving forward. It’s been a long time coming and was no easy task, but we’re just about there.

Just trust me when I say humbly that I hope we don’t do this again. It was a lot of work and the entire team contributed to this upgrade. While seamless to you, you will notice faster response times in your account and again, faster development of new features in the coming months. Specifically thanks go out to John, Tony, Mike and Josh for the assistance here.

New API

With the upgraded platform came an upgrade and industrial strength API revision. A big shout out to John, one of our lead developers, for getting passionate about the API. He was so into it, he started a naming convention after the movie The Matrix (John, that’s weird). Along with the new API comes beautiful documentation and samples – also put together by John.

One of the things that makes him so special and unique is as a developer is that he LOVES great layout and design. When he was working on the documentation, he spent the extra time ensuring it was great to look at for developers. You can check out the new API here and if you need assistance, have questions or suggestions, you can always give us a shout out.

Advanced Triggers

This new feature piggybacks off of the revised Salesforce.com integration. Essentially, it is a GUI inside of SendLabs that lets developers interact in a bi-directional fashion with SendLabs and other systems, leveraging the new API. Frankly, I haven’t a clue what it does, but our development team needed it for some custom integrations and swear that developers will love it. (OK guys, let’s see how well I talk to the developers about SOAP.) Special thanks to John, Erik, Mike and Tony for their hard work on this. John promises me a blog post on this soon.

New Partner Programs

From my perspective, this one is still going to require some tweaking in terms of how it’s packaged and positioned and supported operationally, but we’re pretty close. Essentially, we have three types of partners we work with and in doing so, we create a really cool win-win setup in the process. Who’s this geared for? Referral partners, agency partners and ESP partners. This past month alone, we’ve seen an increase in all three and are going to invest in the partner program more heavily in 2010.

Our aim is to help partners augment their offerings and make money, even building a network of “preferred” SendLabs partners (coming soon), sending new opportunities for consulting/agency work to those who work closely with us. Thank you to Josh for helping me talk this through and providing guidance.

New Customers

This months, we secured a bunch of new relationships with some really great new customers and new agencies and have a stocked funnel of potential new customers for the traditionally slow business month of December. It’s great to be a company that is respected for knowing their stuff. Our confidence is provided by our team and our passion for a great product/service. Speaking of that, I’ve got some followup to do.

New Pricing & Editions

This isn’t completely baked yet, but we’re working on revising our pricing approach, along with the insertion of editions. Though I am leery of adding too much complexity, I think this will help us and our potential new customers identify themselves much quicker and will lead to more sales and better choices by our customers. We appeal to the small marketer starting out, as well as the Enterprise level, and creating distinct editions will help package our solution a little better as opposed to a one-size-fits-all.

Micro Features

Over the coming months, we will be releasing a number of what we call “micro-features” – simple improvements and additions that should make you feel warm and fuzzy. Look for interface tweaks and optimizations, as well as some light revamps of user experiences throughout the application. This is the fun stuff and we aim to make the experience of working inside of SendLabs a joy. We like to think of our technology as a beautiful car – not only with the horsepower to drive, but the smooth ride and comfortable feel sitting int the drivers seat. And please, share with us your thoughts on what we can do to make things better.

New Features

Stay tuned as we release revised dynamic content, upgraded social media snippets and a bunch of other features in the coming months. We also are working steadily on our new video library of tutorials. Stay tuned.

New Blog

We’re putting the final touches on our new blog, powered by the very cool Posterous. It’s dead simple to use and we’re pumped to support guys we like. We maintained our own blog and it’s source code for some time now, but we’ve got better things to do.

Wow, what a month! Of course, we started on many of these items before November so we had a god jump start. But with such change comes the responsibility for me to secure more customers this month. If you’re thinking about joining our customer base, give me a shout! We’d love to show you what we’re all about and how our email marketing software, combined with our email brains. can help power the most simple or sophisticated campaigns.

And of course, don’t forget to join our Enews list, follow us on the ever cool Twitter and be our Facebook friend.

ESPN Shop Email

So here’s the deal: there were two teams playing and one was going to be the national champion at the end of the night. ESPNShop was obviously going to have merchandise for both and obviously created emails for both scenarios. Just hours after Alabama raised the crystal trophy, they sent this out and as bleary-eyed fans checked their email Friday morning, they already had an outlet to buy merchandise and celebrate.

How does this apply to you? Is part of your business based on a result from an outside act or event like this? Just create emails based on either scenario and pounce on that! Why wouldn’t you? Look, you have a timely marketing mechanism and you can control the content, time and date of when you deploy it. Put in the work that your competitors aren’t and take that money for yourself.

What did we learn today?

• Plan ahead.
• Be timely.
• Use email.
• Make money.

And as always, follow us on Twitter or be our Facebook friend – also timely and well-planned ahead.

At some point this summer, I went to Kohl’s and upon checkout, there was a pad of marketing leaflets emblazoned with ‘Give us your e-mail address and get $5 off’ which you can see below in all of its crinkled and scanned in glory. Intrigued as to how to process works as I am a man of the email people, I acquiesced and signed up…literally.

Note 1: When you ask someone to physically write down information, there is a greater chance of data loss because of handwriting. Always get someone to type into something if possible.

So I’m cleaning up some papers off the desk yesterday and I came across this sheet. I never have got an email from Kohl’s. I made it a point to write pretty cleanly, so I know that’s not the reason. What happened?

Note 2: When it comes to transferring information from paper to ‘puter, assume the worst.

Here’s the potential assumed process. I write it down and hand it to the clerk. She takes it and puts it in her drawer and then gives to a manager. The manager either enters in herself or mails to corporate. Depending on what other crisis is happening in the retail world that day, I’m guessing this doesn’t move to the top of the list. Upon mailing, how is it confirmed that it gets there? What’s the process on their end?

Note 3: Minimize the issues and make it simple.

Kohl’s is a major brand and had revenues of $16.4 billion in 2009. Yet, they trust their email marketing efforts to an antique system that is wrought with potential errors. My suggestion: have some sort of system like a normal keyboard that allows a customer to quickly enter in information at the point of sale, kinda like how Redbox does it with a touchscreen. I get an automated email on the spot when I do any transaction and boom – I’m done. It should be that simple, but apparently they don’t put as much stock into email collection as they should.

A pad of paper? In this era? C’mon. Should I wear Zubaz pants and start listening to Thriller again?