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.

8Seconds, an agency specializing in real time multivariate email optimization, links its expertise with CheetahMail, a global expert in email marketing campaigns to provide relevant real time testing.

Belgian company specialized in the field of interactive marketing, 8Seconds has developed a tool that allows multivariate testing by email in real time to improve performance and profitability.

In a common desire to meet their clients needs, CheetahMail and 8Seconds have joined their expertise to get the best of email marketing: “Marketing in general and especially online marketing is increasingly becoming more analytical. Marketers and large volume email senders like CheetahMail understand everyday more and more how effective email testing can be to improve the response rate and ROI of their email campaigns. With 8Seconds Optimizer, we offer marketers the ability to test and adapt their email campaigns, in real time. These marketers see immediate benefits and increased response rates. We are really excited to work together with CheetahMail.” says Sofie Andries, Account Strategy Director at 8Seconds.

To meet a growing demand from their mutual customers, both partners have chosen to work together to help marketers to identify the most relevant content to display in emails. This partnership provides marketers the ability to automatically test many combinations of elements and so effortlessly detect the most effective variables. In other words, it is now possible to optimize the content of its email campaigns by analyzing the behavior of its customers and this in real time. Moreover, beyond reading basic email marketing key indicators for each combination (openers rate of clickers, reactivity …), it is also possible to follow the final conversion rate of the operation.

“This partnership with 8Seconds represents a breakthrough for our customers. Indeed, today it is essential to stand out to demonstrate responsiveness and precision. Not only our customers require getting to manage real time feedback with access to a powerful platform but they also want new functionality that make all their campaigns successful and enable their final customers. To achieve this goal, 8Seconds is the best solution on the market, and we are proud to have demonstrated the relevance of our association“, added Jean-Philippe Baert, CEO of CheetahMail France.

Press contact:
Sofie Andries
Account Strategy Director
+32 479.98.95.19
sofie@8seconds.net

To learn more about this partnership, please contact Loïc Dilly – ldilly@experian-cheetahmail.fr.

About 8Seconds

8Seconds is a Belgian company active in the interactive marketing sector. One of the founders of 8Seconds developed a tool that increases the success ratio of all online marketing efforts through statistical analysis and optimization techniques. The tool was developed because of the lack of any comparable tool that was effective in optimizing electronic advertising in real time and efficiently.

8Seconds Email Optimizer increases the conversion rate of email campaigns by testing and optimizing email campaigns based on the customer’s clicking behavior.

CheetahMail around the world

CheetahMail is an e-mail marketing service provider which uses intelligent client technologies working for some of the largest advertisers in the world. Having some of the largest customer service teams in the e-mail industry using advanced e-mail functionality technologies and providing a large range of data management options, CheetahMail allows advertisers to construct pertinent communications campaigns in conjunction with their customers. Being a partner of some of the best known international brands, CheetahMail has a highly-diversified worldwide customer database which includes Barclays, Auchan, KLM, Neiman Marcus and HP. CheetahMail is one of the business units of the Experian Ltd group (LSE : EXPN), it was founded in 1998 and is based in New York. The company has offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Dusseldorf, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Beijing and Johannesburg.

For more information please contact: info@cheetahmail.com.

About Experian

Experian is the leading global information services company, providing data and analytical tools to clients in more than 80 countries. The company helps businesses to manage credit risk, prevent fraud, target marketing offers and automate decision making. Experian also helps individuals to check their credit report and credit score, and protect against identity theft.

Experian plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange (EXPN) and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 index. Total revenue for the year ended 31 March 2011 was US $4.2 billion. Experian employs approximately 15,000 people in 41 countries and has its corporate headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Nottingham, UK; California, US; and São Paulo, Brazil.

For more information, visit http://www.experianplc.com.

What do you have to do?

Buy a subscription or campaign credits

Execute and optimize your campaign(s)

Send email confirmation to participate

The prize

The campaign with the highest gain wins this competition. The winner will appear in our next newsletter and that company will be given a 3 months subscription of up to a maximum of 2 campaigns per month FOR FREE.

Well executed optimization and execution speed are vital for any marketing professional who wishes to beat competitors in the same sector, getting more ROI for less efforts. Based on our experience, when e-mail images are properly tested, campaigns will increase the number of CTRs by 45% and often more.

Have some fun with this

Why not have your colleague to guess which version of your test will win? Offer a reward to those who can guess the winning image(s).

For more information regarding this competition contact me today: sofie@8seconds.net

Conventional A/B split testing

Most of our clients are familiar with A/B split testing : you send out two or more different emails to a random sample of your target group, i.e. 5 000 email addresses for each creation. Typically after sending you can start analysis after a few hours, the CTRs for each image per email.  IF you are lucky you may have a statistically significant difference between email A and B.  In this case you can send out the winner the rest of your database. But suppose you are unlucky, and there is no significant difference, what then?  You have to start the testing process all over again. And suppose you have more than just two images to test, then the scale of complexity grows exponentially.

8Seconds’ MVT (multivariate testing)

With the 8Seconds’ RT Image Optimizer there is no need to split your test into random sample groups to test.  It automatically shows the different images and combination of images of your email campaign to exactly the number of sample groups required to get a winning result. 8Seconds measures the CTRs on the images to be optimized, and finds the best clicking image or combination of images. Once a winner is identified, only the winning combination will be shown to the rest of your database – all of this in one step, in real time. So no more waiting, no more guessing if your sample groups were statistically significant enough, no more unnecessary double work. In other words: 8Seconds goes one step further to help you make the best choices each time, the first time.

The 8Seconds’ advantages, compared to A/B split testing:

1. No more samples : you send the different creations/combination of creations at once to your whole database.
2. No more A/B : 8Seconds goes much further. You can test more images and also combination of images in one single email.
3. No more analyses : we do this for you. In real time, our algorithm decides which image works best, and only shows the best working image or combination of images to the rest of your database. Hours and days of analyses and setting up campaigns becomes automated with a statistical significance.
4. No more wasting time : we do everything in real time. 8Seconds measures the difference in CTR on the different images you optimize. And in real time we send the best working creation to the rest of your database.
5. No complexity : you do not need to be an IT specialist to implement the campaigns in 8Seconds Optimizer. Within the hour, your campaign is set to be sent.

If you ask 5 persons to chose the winning call-to-action from 5 creations, there is one certainty: NON will like the same creation! Marketers, the sales manager, the CEO … everybody starts following his or her guts feeling. This until a decision is taken and the chosen creation will be sent out to the target group.

Quite some companies make one essential mistake by doing this : they do not listen enough to their target group.

8Seconds’ advice to every e-marketer is stop guessing and start testing. And take advantage of the medium you are using: email marketing is oh so measurable and moreover very flexible and cheap to change creations. With 8Seconds, it is even possible in real time.

What does  8Seconds do? The 8Seconds’ Optimizer shows the different creations of your email campaign to your target group/database. 8Seconds measures the CTR on the images being optimized and in real time, 8Seconds finds the best clicking image or combination of images which will be shown to the rest of your database. In other words : 8Seconds listens to your target group as They decide what They like best.