One fascination in a presidential race mostly bereft of intrigue was the strange, incessant, and weirdly overfamiliar e-mails that emanated from the Obama campaign. Anyone who shared an address with the campaign soon started receiving messages from Barack Obama with subject lines such as “Join me for dinner?” “It’s officially over,” “It doesn’t have to be this way,” or just “Wow.” Jon Stewart mocked them on the Daily Show. The women’s website the Hairpin likened them to notes from a stalker.

But they worked. Most of the $690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails. During the campaign, Obama’s staff wouldn’t answer questions about them or the alchemy that made them so successful. Now, with the election over, they’re opening the black box.

The appeals were the product of rigorous experimentation by a large team of analysts. “We did extensive A-B testing not just on the subject lines and the amount of money we would ask people for,” says Amelia Showalter, director of digital analytics, “but on the messages themselves and even the formatting.”
The campaign would test multiple drafts and subject lines-often as many as 18 variations-before picking a winner to blast out to tens of millions of subscribers. “When we saw something that really moved the dial, we would adopt it,” says Toby Fallsgraff, the campaign’s e-mail director, who oversaw a staff of 20 writers.

It quickly became clear that a casual tone was usually most effective. “The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people,” Fallsgraff says. “‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.” Another blockbuster in June simply read, “I will be outspent.” According to testing data shared with Bloomberg Businessweek, that outperformed 17 other variants and raised more than $2.6 million.
Writers, analysts, and managers routinely bet on which lines would perform best and worst. “We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,” says Showalter. “Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, ‘How could we make things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s eye to.”

Another unexpected hit: profanity. Dropping in mild curse words such as “Hell yeah, I like Obamacare” got big clicks. But these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life. “Eventually the novelty wore off, and we had to go back and retest,” says Showalter.

Fortunately for Obama and all political campaigns that will follow, the tests did yield one major counter intuitive insight: Most people have a nearly limitless capacity for e-mail and won’t unsubscribe no matter how many they’re sent. “At the end, we had 18 or 20 writers going at this stuff for as many hours a day as they could stay awake,” says Fallsgraff. “The data didn’t show any negative consequences to sending more.”

After a pause, he offered a qualification: “We do know that getting all those e-mails in your in-box is at least mildly irritating to some people. Even my father would point that out to me.”

The bottom line: Obama’s e-mail fund raising team tested hundreds of grabby subject lines. The most successful – “Hey” – brought in millions of dollars.

How 8Seconds Works: Experian clients can get started within minutes of registering to the online service with no IT support required. By using a proprietary quantitative algorithm, winning content combinations are identified quickly, with minimal waste of contact data, in real time. The most successful combination is then automatically shown to all remaining recipients who have not yet opened their mail The real time analysis can ensure considerably optimized ROI from email campaigns by applying the email variant with the best performance rather than on completion of transmission to a predefined test group.

“As a Technology provider we are delighted that front running marketers in Germany are now able to leverage Experian’s e-mail platform and professional services domain expertise to apply this creative optimization application”,
says Sofie Andries, 8Seconds’ Director of Strategic Accounts.

Jörn Grunert, CEO of Experian Marketing Services in Germany, adds:
“The 8Seconds’ tool is set to play a pivotal role in the implementation of email marketing campaigns. A precise analysis of which creative performs best, is absolutely essential if a campaign is to achieve maximum effectiveness. With the 8Seconds’ Optimizer we can act faster and more efficiently – and ultimately our customers can look forward to an even greater ROI.”

8Seconds’ solution will strengthen e-Dialog’s existing product portfolio, which provides brands with a multichannel view of the customer to help better understand consumer behaviour and preferences. 8Seconds Optimizer will ensure every message a customer receives through e-Dialog’s product suite has the best possible combination of content and images, automatically generating the optimum email following real time response optimisation.

“e-Dialog has fantastic technology to ensure relevant messages are delivered to customers and now we’re able to ensure that no step on of the customer journey is left to chance”
said Luke Griffiths, General Manager e-Dialog EMEA.

“Today we’re focused on the customer’s journey through the entire digital ecosystem and 8Seconds’ Optimizer solution is the ideal tool for our clients’ complex marketing needs as it tests and learns in real time to deliver the best converting messages and calls-to-action to the consumer.”

Some of the key benefits of the 8Seconds solution include:

• Increased Return on Investment (ROI) – The content of the email campaign is adapted to deliver the version of creative content that converts best to a targeted audience, using quantitative algorithms to ensure as few contacts as possible are wasted during optimization;
• Simple – 8Seconds’ technology will be integrated with e-Dialog’s product suite to allow clients to turn on email optimisation for campaigns as needed;
• Quick – The optimisation of the email happens in real time, so as soon as the ideal combination has been found it is the only message sent to the rest of the database;
• Risk Management – It helps marketers ensure that they replace “gut feel” with an objective way to make better creative choices, more often, with average gains exceeding 50% and usually much more.

Sofie Andries, Client Services Director at 8Seconds commented:
“8Seconds is designed to save brands time and money with an automated business process that takes the hassle and the risk out of managing creative optimisation of every campaign while assuring the achievement of maximum ROI. e-Dialog offers some of the most advanced digital marketing technology on the market, so our partnership will ensure the final message delivered is as robust as the rest of the e-Dialog product suite. As a result, e-Dialog’s clients will be able to deliver even better conversion results as well as increased customer retention and value.”

e-Dialog client, Philips Consumer Lifestyle, is already using the solution and Basile Fattal, senior manager CRM and consumer engagement, commented:
“When we ran the 8Seconds real time Image Optimizer on 10 campaigns we achieved an average gain of 192%. Our best optimisation was a Senseo-campaign with a gain of 905%. This has convinced me that 8Seconds should be used as a standard part of any large volume campaign design with a direct response component.”
For more information about Philips Consumer Lifestyle’s experience, please visit:
http://bit.ly/o2xCoN

About 8Seconds

Conventional multivariate and A/B techniques are costly, time consuming and wasteful. All marketing professionals know they should test all creative before publishing, yet most never do given the painful hassle and cost of this business process. Founded in 2008 the 8Seconds Optimizer addresses this need as the first real time quantitative multivariate designed to save time, cut waste, and to make creative optimization simple. Marketers and ad agencies are achieving average gains of 50% and more over losing combinations, providing assurance to creative content decisions on every campaign. Users globally can get started on the standard browser based version within minutes. 8Seconds APIs are available to enable integrations into automated marketing suites and ESP platforms to add real-time, automated subject line, body and image optimization in one seamless experience.
For more information, visit www.8seconds.net.

About e-Dialog

Established in 1997, e-Dialog empowers marketers to meaningfully connect with customers by engaging in relevant conversations through e-mail, mobile devices, social networks, e-commerce and at the point of sale. e-Dialog’s technology and services give marketers direct access to timely customer insight that drives targeted and opportunity-rich consumer dialogs. With e-Dialog, marketers quickly transform conversations into conversions and evolve customer relationships from the newly acquired to the highly engaged.

Consistently recognized by top analyst firms for both outstanding service and first-class technology, e-Dialog is a global provider to some of the world’s most recognized brands, including AirTran Airways, Avis Budget Group, Boots, British Airways, CVS/pharmacy, Nintendo, the NFL, PETCO, and The TJX Companies. With offices in Boston, London, New York, Seattle and Singapore, e-Dialog is a wholly owned subsidiary of GSI Commerce Inc. (Nasdaq: GSIC).
For more information, visit http://www.e-dialog.com.

Press contact
Laura Nettley
Diffusion PR
020 7291 0236
laura.nettley@diffusionpr.com

8Seconds Optimizer launches “Mobile Segmentation”.

Use Mobile Segmentation to split your campaign in 2 segments and track the behavior of recipients based on their device: mobile or non-mobile.

8Seconds Optimizer will choose a winner for each segment so that you will find the best content for each segment.

Would you like to get more information about this new feature? Please let us know via support@8seconds.net

For the boards of leading brands and creative agencies there are two trends that should worry some and truly inspire the others who really “get it”:

The lazy habit of many marketeers that continue to take short cuts in the campaign execution process by going on gut feel, and skipping pre-testing creative content per audience.

The pressure finance and procurement are putting ad agencies under to cut non-working spend (see AdAge article May 8th).

Both trends are understandable. Traditional methods of multivariate pre-testing of creative content are expensive, talent intensive and time consuming in a digital media universe. Companies everywhere are seeking ways to cut costs.

Many agencies do not seem to be able to counter this trend either. In 2007, marketeers gave their collective agencies a Net Promoter Score^TM (NPS) of minus 21%. “Nothing has changed in the agency business since 2007″ declared Stefan Kolle this week, managing partner of FutureLab and visionary and publisher on market trending. “They still think that their creative is helping the brands, without ever proving the business value of their creative content.” In spite of this devastating judgment, 93% of these agencies considered themselves to be the driver of their client’s marketing success. See a review of the future of the agency business downloadable here.

This builds a strong business case for automated quantitative multivariate optimizing to insure that marketing management make better decisions more often. The utilization of such solutions satisfies two tangible business criteria:

• Creates competitive advantage by getting enabling creative content “non-working spend” deliver bigger ROI returns on “working spend – media” which usually consumes 85% of the budget;
• Enables giving monetary value to creative content based on the conversions in cost and/or revenue per response delivered compared to alternative creative content.

Creative by Gut Feel: Choice or chance?

It is a fact that hundreds of millions of dollars or lost due to poor creative content choices in e-mail campaigns. Recently we received a call from one CRM marketing manager with a question:
“Why should we pay for multivariate testing if during a pilot period of testing we could show that the winner performed only modestly better than the ‘control’ creative that we chose?”

A “Control Group” is a random choice based on gut feel. It is a gamble, a roll of the dice. This is the way most marketeers are doing it today. There is a rare chance you could chose a winner once in a while, but unlikely when working between 5 and 18 combinations. Gut feel is usually based on “past experience” or “the guidelines of best practices set by headquarters” or “because that is what the boss, or bosses wife has decided”. We have seen time and again that even if a test was done a week or a year ago to find out that this color or that CTA works, it is no assurance that it will work next week for that audience. It is worrying is this is the filtering process towards making a final choice of what the audience will finally see.

SunParcs case study illustrates the “cost” of choosing the wrong control creative. The control group would have generated an 830% loss of downloads when compared to the winning combination. Another B2B client, NXP, did a similar optimization on a niche campaign. The loser performed would have cost them a 75% gain without 8Seconds. A client of Return Path, an on-line clothing e-tailer in the US mid-west would have lost $75,000 in extra revenue if they had not used 8Seconds on a single mailing.

So why does senior management allow marketeers to take the risk when it is now so easy to limit the risks of bad choices? There is no longer any excuse. By integrating an automated, quantitative multivariate optimizing into every e-mail campaign business process, marketing management are buying insurance to make better decisions more often.

Non-Working Spending: Quantifying Creative

Ad agencies are under enormous pressure to optimize. In these times it is tough to defend budgets, especially creative content. However, when you can show real dollar value returns on creative, this defense becomes easier. This is where 8Seconds can help you. We recently had one CRM marketing manager of a global entertainment brand asked the question: “Was it worth spending big bucks on a celebrity sponsored creative, or rely on agency creative alone?”. Using 8Seconds he had the answer 48 hours later. The answer allowed him to set the right ratio between “non-working spend” and “working spend” within this scenario, and to effectively defend his creative content budgets with solid ROI facts.

In fact, using e-mail with quantitative RT Optimization to justify such creative campaigns for destined other channels – banner ads, bill boards, print ads, direct mail – can be an extremely fast way to poll audience responses. 8Seconds has one global consumer electronics brand that is using 8Seconds as an alternative to classic focus group ad and packaging testing which can cost over €50,000 each time and take weeks to execute. By sending out 5 to 10 variations of a message with different calls to action to a targeted selection of registered customers, within less than 48 hours they were already able to identify which creative combinations pull best – before deploying “working spend” media costs.

Creative Content Insurance: Automated Quantitative RT Optimization

Today a small number of Ad agencies and marketing managers of leading brands who get it, are leading the pack. They are already using 8Seconds to support their budgets and to maximize ROI on both non-working and working spends. For ad agencies, it means more budgets are spent on creating content that converts, and building strong bridges with CRM departments as well as traditional marcom rolls. For marketeers it means they are able to deliver higher conversions for the same spend as their competitors. For customers, they receive creative that is more compelling and relevant to their needs and desires. This is a win/win/win.

To summarize, the key benefit of using 8Seconds to get these results include:

Insurance – using 8Seconds enables marketing professionals to limit potential damage of choosing the worst performing creatives based on gut feel.

Speed – it takes minutes rather than days to execute multivariate testing. That is why clients subscribe to the 8Seconds SaaS Service and are now optimizing with on every campaign as a standard business process.

Waste & reliability – 8Seconds finds winners burning the fewest contacts, a big saving verses conventional multivariate techniques. This is done by using quantitative optimization technology and methodologies i.e. no choices are made without a statistically valid bases.

Online marketing agency Yourzine and 8Seconds, announce the signing of their partnership. With the 8Seconds automated multivariate optimization application for e-mail – the 8Seconds Optimizer, Yourzine is now capable of bringing the effectiveness of email related campaigns and newsletter to a higher level.

“Our clients notice the result almost immediately. We support our clients in testing variables to search for the most effective and therefore the most profitable campaign. In reality, done the conventional way this is still a very time consuming process. With the 8Seconds’ solution, we optimize the campaigns of our clients automatically, giving us more time to deploy our creativity and domain knowledge more intensively and to ensure that every campaign is maximized to contribute to the best results.”

Michiel van Riemsdijk, CEO of Yourzine

The 8Seconds Optimizer is designed to save time and to make multivariate creativity optimization simple. It is user friendly, and everything goes automatically, reducing the time required to enable optimization by well over 75%. As a result, companies can afford to do creativity optimization on every campaign as a standard business process in their email marketing execution model.

“What makes 8Seconds so unique is the fact that since the company started over 3 years ago it is the pioneer and only company to offer multivariate creativity optimization in real time – with automated decision making algorithms. Our clients tell us they save an enormous amount of time to manage optimization while achieving maximum ROIs from their creative content choices. Since it is offered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), there is no IT set up required, and users can get started within minutes.”
Sofie Andries, Account Strategy Director of 8Seconds

About Yourzine

Yourzine is a leading online marketing agency in The Netherlands. The company is specialized in development of client contact strategies for its customers. The starting point is in every single case creating customer value. Yourzine gives advice, optimizes and realizes.

The agency analyses all available data on existing client contacts and client behavior and takes care of the integration of primary processes. Based on those insights, Yourzine develops effective client contact strategies by means of a very precise email marketing approach, acquisition campaigns or a complete cross channel strategy. Yourzine works for leading companies as HEMA, Albert Heijn, IKEA Nederland, CZ Insurance, Efteling, Luxaflex, Unicef and Eneco.

Yourzine is part of the LECTRIC Group, that consists of 8 innovative internet companies. The companies which belong to the LECTRIC Group: Colours, Lectric Internetopleidingen, NR6, SearchResult, Someone, Social Inc., symfony-xib en Yourzine.

For more information, visit www.yourzine.nl

emailInsider – the inside line on email marketing – posted the following article on its blog on 9th January 2012, written by Morgan Steward.
Morgan Stewart is Co-Founder and CEO of Trendline Interactive.

Read more …

In 2001, Return Path started to review new product concepts to add on to Return Path’s original offerings. Return Path interviewed almost its entire customer base and found two issues that were most interesting around which to build an additional business: deliverability and email message optimization. Return Path chose deliverability.
“When we later heard that 8seconds was tackling multivariate optimization and decided to check it out.”

How our US on-line retail client earned $75K extra with 8Seconds, explained by George Bilbrey

Smart email marketers know that call to action content that has been tested will always generate better ROI results than taking a “best guess” at which offer to send out. The operational challenge is finding the time to do this quickly and cost effectively. With this in mind, we looked at the 8Seconds real time call-to-action optimization solution which promised to do exactly that: optimize the best call to action, with minimal effort. So we chose one of our own Return Path clients to run a test. George Bilbrey, Co-Founder & President, Return Path

Test campaign details:

The client was a large US retailer of apparel, outdoor gear and home goods. We set up two campaigns sent out to two separate segments of their email marketing data base:

- the first was a segment of subscribers who had made an online purchase over the past 12 months;
- the second was a segment of subscribers who hadn’t made a purchase in the past 24 months.

Both campaigns tested the use of different images and calls-to-action to see which combination would drive higher engagement, click-throughs (CTRs) and conversions.

The results:

As the result of using the 8Seconds optimizer tool, one campaign saw a lift of 16% and the second saw a lift of 20% for a combined revenue increase of approximately $75,000 extra. The winning combination of images for each campaign drove a revenue increase of 57% and 33% respectively.

Based on these results, we recommend that email marketers make it a top priority to use an automated call to action optimization solution like 8Seconds when seeking ways to optimize ROI and improve customer engagement experiences.
By George Bilbrey, Co Fournder & President, Return Path.

Return Path provides a suite of powerful solutions for reaching the inbox and protecting your sender reputation. For more information on Return Path’s solutions please visit: http://www.returnpath.net

“Mobistar moves as provider of mobile, internet and digital TV in a very competitive market, so it is necessary to stay ahead of competition. Not only by building a strong brand which promises to make life easier: for Mobistar, life is the combination of 3 dimensions: ‘Love’, ‘Work’ and ‘Play’. Besides a strong brand, we measure and improve every communication we do.
In this direction, we have optimized more than 10 email campaigns with the technology of 8Seconds. With an average gain of 251%, we had excellent ROI results on these campaigns. We discovered that optimizing calls-to-action is not a one-off exercise. All kinds of factors influence audience behavior that can impact how they respond such as the weather, time of year, demographic mix, economics, competitor communications, and things we could not even imagine. So a colour or offer that worked last week or last month, may not work so well next week. So, we intend to keep on testing and learning continuously on future campaigns.”

Pierre Cordier, Online Channels Traffic Manager, Mobistar

The challenge: Mobistar promoted My25 fee which includes more than 100 free minutes, sms’s and mobile internet. For the promotion of the product, Mobistar sent this emailing out to a segment of the database: 43.900 persons in total.

The results: Mobistar puts a lot of attention to the call to action-buttons as this is the button that really pushes people to sales. For this acquisition emailing, Mobistar choose for 8 different versions of the call to action button. The following results show that with a very small difference in creation and tone of voice, you can make a big difference in results.

It is clear by these results that “I discover…”, works better than the more sales oriented CTA-buttons: “I activate now” or “I switch now”.

The winning version of the email was sent to the rest of the database in real time. In other words, 8Seconds adapts the content of the emailing in real time as soon as a statistical validity is achieved. The total gain for this campaign was 398% when compared to the losing combination.

Here are the key changes summarized:

8Seconds has from now on 2 versions in the 8Seconds’ Optimizer:

RT Image Optimizer – browser version

This is the classic real time optimization solution from 8Seconds that our results oriented, pioneering clients have grown to enjoy. You can get started now and it works on any e-mail marketing platform, anywhere. There are no changes on this release.

RT Enterprise Optimizer – API

This is the truly advanced version for the marketers who are ready to take multivariate testing to a totally new level. It is a fully featured application that includes:

• subject header
• body text
• image testing
• advanced KPI reporting

And the following NEW features for this version:

Eliminate losers one-by-one

This is like that game called “Last Man Standing”: Instead of choosing 1 winner which will automatically be shown to the rest of the database, you will have the possibility to continue the optimization by continuously dropping the lowest performer until there is just one winner left. In this case, only the best working version(s) will be shown to the rest of your database.

Social Impact

Not everyone wants to measure success based on CTRs. Some mailings are intended to trigger a social impact by being forwarded to friends and colleagues, for example. When social is the basis for your optimization, now you can have it. You can measure such things as how many times your email was forwarded to other recipients. You can also add the links to your social pages and track how many recipients go to your social pages through the email. LinkedIn, Facebook and Facebook ‘likes’, and Twitter, so the main social media.

How can you implement this feature?

Easy, as always at 8Seconds:

For ‘Elimination’ or ‘Social Impact’ just tick the box:

Check out the stories of top 1% performers here:

Consumer Lifestyle products – Philips
FMCG – Ijsboerke
Media – De Telegraaf
Telecom – UPC

Get more for your e-mail marketing investments without the IT hassels. Register for our E-Mail RT Impact Webex training today at: optimizer@8seconds.net

Send us an email and give us your availabilities. In 30 minutes, we will show how you can:

• Boost your monthly ROIs with 45%+;
• Achieve KPIs that will impress your boss, client and management team;
• Save so much time you will be able to truly enjoy a cappuccino, or other relaxation treat while your competitors struggle to catch up;
• Put your company into the top 1% percentage performer in its sector.