Don’t send e-mails that don’t work →

The Obama campaign succeeded online in part by taking an obvious step. They tested:

Any time you received an email from the Obama campaign, it had been tested on 18 smaller groups and the response rates had been gauged. The campaign thought all the letters had a good chance of succeeding, but the worst-performing letters did only 15 to 20 percent of what the best-performing emails could deliver. So, if a good performer could do $2.5 million, a poor performer might only net $500,000. The genius of the campaign was that it learned to stop sending poor performers.

I wouldn’t call it genius, but too few marketers do it.

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