“HTML” vs “Plain Text Personal” A/B Test Smackdown: What’s Better In Newsletters?
The following is an excerpt from Part 2 of The Predictable Revenue Guide To Tripling Your Sales:
Ever wonder why people open & read – or don’t – your emails? Well one thing that is quickly becoming essential for marketing or sales emails is the feeling that an email “comes from someone” – that it’s not a blast…
People want to hear from people – not machines
In B2B marketing, it’s still cool to make your newsletters very pretty with logos, images, colors and HTML. But while it’s fancy, it’s not the most effective way to write to your audience.
People respond better to other people – or at least what seems like another person. When newsletters look and feel more like an email coming from one person, your audience responds better.
This is something the best internet marketers in the world have known for a long time, but it’s slowly trickling out to businesses.
A Webinar Invitation A/B Test
Monica Girolami’s the head of marketing for NewVoiceMedia, and she ran a test for a webinar. First she invited people with a fancy HTML email that read more like a mass update. Then she sent a newsletter that looked and read more like a personal email from her.
It was in plain text. It came from Monica, and “reply-to” went to Monica. She wrote it as if she was writing to a friend. Monica tripled her results with the ‘personal’ email invitation:
HTML Email Invitation:
• Open Rate: 13.2%
• Click-through rate: 1.8% • New Registrants: 20
“Personal” Email Invitation:
• Open Rate: 15.3%
• Click-through rate: 4.1% • New Registrants: 60
Monica: “Even more astonishing were all the personal replies I received – ‘sorry I can’t make that time but let me know about the next webcast.”
To see sample screenshots of the emails, download the full eBook here.
