(Version A)

And this?

(Version B)

Well, when it comes to getting people to click on a link,  the first email increases the likelihood that they will click by over 100%. But why?

Every year, the Economic Developers Association of Canada (EDAC) conducts a survey about the marketing practices of its membership. This year’s survey was receiving a much lower response rate than 2009, and EDAC wanted to send out a final reminder to try to boost response rates. To ensure that the email garnered the maximum response, we conducted a simple A/B test with the emails you see above. The emails were identical in subject line and message content, but we swapped the image of a smiling, pointing human face with a pie chart in versions A and B.

We started by picking the pie chart image that fit with the idea of the survey. But then we got to thinking that there is a lot of research out there that shows a big jump in clicks and opens when you have human subjects looking at or pointing to the call to action in your message. We decided to test it out for ourselves and sent Version A and Version B to a subset of the overall email list (10% each) and ran the test for six hours. The results are shown below:

Open Rates

• Version A (smiling pointer) – 25%
• Version B (pie chart) – 13%

Click Rates

• Version A (smiling pointer) – 8%
• Version B (pie chart) – 4%

Based on the size of EDAC’s mailing list, we can extrapolate that they received an estimated 46 extra clicks (100%) and 93 extra opens (90%) by sending the winning Version A to the remaining 80% of their mailing list, rather than Version B.

Results:

Sure enough, the response rate to the survey doubled within a week of sending out the reminder email, bringing them back up to 2009 levels. Had we sent out original pie chart version without testing, we’d likely be extending the survey deadline and sending another email plea.

We’ve blogged before about the importance of doing A/B testing with your email campaigns. This recent A/B test for EDAC using our 3mail Email Campaign Tool (shameless plug) demonstrates the incredible difference in results that can be achieved by something as simple as changing a single image.