The other day I wanted to do a test as I wasn't happy with the results of my email campaigns. I knew I could do better for myself, my readers and my vendors. What I didn't expect was that the new email campaign I had created sent when scheduled, but my old email campaign went out as well. A big Monday ooops - but I'm looking at it as an A/B test with a twist {it sent to the same exact list - just 2 minutes apart. Turns out my old email campaign was never paused as I had thought it was}.

So, are you ready to find out how I more than doubled my email open AND click rate?

I had been sending emails to my subscribers with the RSS option in MailChimp. This meant they were receiving my entire blog post in the email. Problem? YES! They had no reason to click to my site and see the post the "pretty" way. You know, with proper text formatting and photos aligning like they do in the blog post. If, I tried the excerpt method, the photo from the post was missing. Neither way was an option for me anymore. I wanted to give my subscribers a reason to not only want to open my emails but to also come to my blog.

Here's exactly what I did to more than double my email open AND click rate . . .
• I posed a question in the email subject
• I added in copy {details from the blog post}
• I shared only 1 photo from the post
• I encouraged my readers to click to see more

The Results?

My open AND click rate for the new email campaign had increased more than twice that of the RSS campaign {just under 3x actually}.

PS: my sincere apologies to my subscribers for receiving both emails and a huge thank you for not unsubscribing. The problem has since been fixed for future email campaigns.

Bottom Line . . .

Take that little bit of extra time to craft an original email and schedule it to send after your blog post is drafted. This is easy and I had my custom email created in under 10 minutes with the replicate campaign option in MailChimp. You will increase your open and click rates AND bring more readers to your blog in the process. It's a complete win win :)