To Optimize Or Abandon: Balancing Data-Driven Decisions With Intuition

Author:

Wacarra Yeomans

Source:

One of my favorite aspects of email marketing is that we have a distinct advantage in getting performance metrics immediately when we send a campaign. I jokingly refer to it as “design by the numbers.” We get the instant gratification along with the long-time lessons associated with weeks and weeks of metrics reviews.

Our process is to review metrics and use them to inform our design, copy and marketing decisions. In other words, use them to optimize our campaigns. With optimization we can make small improvements in an iterative process. Our creative and marketing strategies constantly evolve because we can see how our subscribers interact with the decisions we make all the time.

We’ve done a lot of testing as an industry on implicit vs. explicit preferences from our subscribers. Time and again, customers’ implicit preferences tend to favor the marketer. We find that customers will engage with three messages a month even if they “say” they only want to hear from us once a month.

We continue to make decisions based on small cues from consumers -- what they clicked on, which subject line got them to convert -- all in real time.

While constant tweaks and improvements are the key to much of what we do, there’s an ...