When laying out your next email ad campaign, ask yourself if you’re putting the close up front where the opening is for the hard sell, or if you’re educating the customer toward an obvious purchase. It makes a difference. I have numbers.
Well, MarketingSherpa has numbers, results from a study designed to test response to pet-related email advertising. The goal was sell pet products, obviously, and one ad featured a prominent call to action that offered a freebie along with purchase of a flea protection product. The other reduced the size of the ad and moved it down, making an article on flea protection more prominent.
The results of the test showed that giving relevant content more prominence than the pitch produced a seven percent increase in click-through rate, a six percent increase in conversions, and a 15 percent increase in order size.
Though this is just one study, it makes sense that emphasizing the information would work better. It lowers the natural guard consumers have raised against ads. With the offer of relevant information, customers have a chance to identify with the topic at hand, thus putting them in a mindset that they need the relevant product.
MarketingSherpa offered these two key takeaways:
o Wisely placed educational articles may heat up sales in a blue economy. With consumers tightening purse strings, Web shoppers are not likely to be in as much of a hurry as they used to be. Therefore, holding people’s hands with educational content can be worthwhile for your brand, Magee says. “As people are looking at their dollars, they want to make a better buying decision.”
o Educational content can create a comfort level for Internet shoppers who don’t have the luxury of physically assessing products the way brick-and-mortar shoppers do. Hence, relevant content can help bridge that gap between the product and the shopper.
Get Elastic shows the ads side by side for comparison.
