It's all about content... and metrics

How important is content quality in your marketing efforts?  Lip service aside, many organizations treat it  secondary at best.  Yet, in the modern world of online marketing, content is one of the most important components of your success.

Let's take an example of email nurturing.  Last week we were planning an email campaign with a very strong article written by an expert and a decent landing page.

We wrote the email and were thinking about the subject line.  My team member had it as "7 ways to ..."  To me, it seemed a little too "fluffy."  So after some more brainstorming we came up with another line that was more informative (at least IMO), like "xx  xx failure rates."

The theory behind it was that the "email receiver" would click on it because it would appear to be more of an informative email vs. "push my products" one.  We spent about an hour on the subject line debate.  Most organizations I know would have considered this as wasted time.  Was it though?

We conducted A/B test during the next few days.  Same email, same call to action, same landing page.   Different subject lines.

Results:

Subject Line 1: "7 ways..."   Open rate: 4.4%, click through rate: 0.2%
Subject Line 2: "...rates"  Open rate: 7.0%, click through rate: 0.5%

As you can see, there is a huge difference in these rates, which translated to 12 (SL1) leads against 50+ (SL2).  This is one of the best demonstrations (supported by metrics) of the difference that content quality makes.

The next A/B test will be this week.  We are going to be testing the email text.  We tuned it on Friday.  Given we see interesting results, I will blog about it later.