Dear Tayllor,

Want to increase your confidence that the marketing emails you send will be successful? You can, with testing! Read Gail's article below and learn how to run some simple tests that can dramatically improve your results.

Here's what you'll find this month:

• Gail Goodman's Article, The Difference a Test Makes
• The June Success Story, featuring Bijoux Mart
• Speak Your Mind, Gail answers the question, "Why do people opt-out?"

What if you could make a slight change to one of your emails and get a 20 percent lift in opens or a 10 percent increase in sales? You would do it in an instant. But how do you know what element to change? That's where testing comes in. Email marketing makes it easy to quickly test important elements of your email at very little or no extra cost. With testing, you can find out what factors influence the success of your email. Follow these five steps to create an effective, measurable test.

Step One: Decide What to Test

Because testing with email is so easy, it's often tempting to test many elements all at once. You should start by testing just one. Why? If you test more than one element in the same email, it is challenging (and sometimes impossible) to determine what exactly influenced the response. Here are some easy and telling tests to start with:

Subject lines - Create two different subject lines for the same email communication. For example, a boutique owner just added a home and garden section, and she wants to get the word out to her customers. Here are the subject lines she'll test.

Subject line #1: New! Home and garden section added
Subject line #2: Get what you need for your home and garden

(Need help writing a great subject line? Read Getting the Subject Line Right, Part I and Part II)

Long versus short copy - Is less really more? Create a shorter version of your current newsletter with teasers and links to your website. Or create two versions of a promotional email. Keep one very short and to the point , and make the other a little longer by adding additional, useful information.

Bijoux Mart International Co., Jewelry Wholesalers
Staying in touch with international customers with email marketing

When your headquarters are in Hong Kong and most of your customers are in Australia, London, and Canada, it takes smart marketing to retain their loyalty. For Bijoux Mart International Co., a fashion jewelry wholesaler, that smart marketing depends heavily on Constant Contact.

Bijoux's email campaigns emphasize photos over copy, but twice a year they include tips on hot trends in jewelry, along with suggestions about Bijoux products that are examples of the trends. Sometimes, they include information about how to use new features on Bijoux's website. And once a month, they also includes incentive coupons.

Do you have a question about email marketing best practices? We want to hear from you! Please send us your questions, feedback, and ideas. Contact us now!

Gail Goodman, the CEO of Constant Contact, is a dynamic speaker and author, as well as an expert in small business and marketing. She has been featured in numerous online and offline publications including Fortune Small Business, Entrepreneur, Small Business Technology Magazine, Inc. Magazine, CNN, and the Boston Business Journal.