During my internship at Nintex as a Marketing Automation Intern I created a weekly blog newsletter to be sent to prospective customers and subscribers; I wrote the copy, designed the email, and set the email up using Marketo. Each week I sent out the newsletter with help from the communications and marketing automation team. It has a theme such as “Tips and Tricks” or “Eliminating Paper-based Processes” and contains 4-5 blog posts.
Over my year at Nintex I created 50 blog newsletters.
NINTEX
1 Year
Marketo
Google Analytics
HTML/CSS
Microsoft Office Suite
After a few weeks of running the newsletter and keeping track with the metrics, I noticed that users were reading the top two blogs in the email more than the bottom two blogs in the email. This made me curious, I wanted to know if a different layout would cause users to read and click links at the bottom of the email more.
In order to test if the email layout would affect how users would read through the email, I ran an A/B test in Marketo comparing the two email layouts, one with image banners to the left of the text and one with the image banner above the text.
The A/B test was a 50/50 split test run over 3 weeks, with random assignment to the groups.
The email design with the images to the left of the text will have more people reading and clicking links at the end of the email than the version with images above the text.
Following the tests, I analyzed the data using metrics such as click-through rate and where they clicked in the emails. To do this analysis I looked at the Email Link Performance Report in Marketo and compared the % clicked and % people for each link. I wanted to know how many people were reading to the bottom of the email as well as how many clicks there were to determine which design performed better.
Ultimately, I found that my hypothesis was wrong, the original layout (images above the text) had 48% more users read the bottom two blog posts than the new layout.
