It’s being said quite a lot lately, but it’s worth repeating: If you’re not fully optimized for mobile, you’re going to miss huge opportunities, particularly when it comes to promotions. Litmus released a study on email opens this past January and found that more than half – 53% — of emails are opened on mobile devices. As you build on your current promotion testing approach, mobile will have to play a key role, particularly where promotions are concerned, so test your promotions, and be sure to incorporate mobile testing strategies.

Testing your promotions

MarketingLand suggests retailers test every email promotion. The article, Merchandising for Email Marketing – Selecting Products and Promotions, suggests that you offer a wide range of fresh promotions, not just traditional closeout sales.

How to test? Consider the following:

Set up traditional A/B testing as often as you can: We’ve recently been posting quite a bit about testing, so consider testing the subject line to see if, for example, offering a high percentage off is more effective than announcing an exclusive sale. Test your creative – Work with your team to develop the right creative for each promotion you do. Again, this is particularly important when you consider mobile users – you may notice a big difference in response with a certain kind of creative that you can turn around and optimize quickly for subsequent campaigns. Find out more about testing creative.

Test RFM differently for promotions: While you don’t typically want to overwhelm customers with too much email, they may react positively to a series of messages that announce a huge one-day-only promotion. Test a three-in-one-day email campaign on a small segment of your list to see if they’ll react well to a series of announcements about a big blowout sale. You can find out more about RFM testing here.

Use site data to test additional sales through email – Review sales data to find out what’s selling well and test various approaches to building on that success through email campaigns. Test the “popular now” approach against the urgency of “they’re almost all gone”, for example, to see which plays better with your customers.

Measure results – As you test your emails for success, measure results with your email analytics, but also look at key performance indicators (KPIs) such as gross revenue and average order value, to find out how well your promotions are doing overall.

Segment for more accurate testing resultsSegment your testing so that you can gain clearer insights on what works best. Don’t forget to utilize data from your email opt-in list to give subscribers what they want (and to refrain from sending them what they don’t want) and also pull data from your loyalty program to target customers by category based on past purchases and behavior.

You will need to optimize continually to keep up with changing tastes and operating system updates, but the effort that you put in will reap greater benefits for your promotions as well as your customer relations. Stay on top of it for best results.