An email campaign can be defined as one or more emails sent to a group of people who have registered to an email list. A timed campaign will send out emails at regular intervals (mostly one email per week). This will usually start when a recipient signs up to receive these campaign emails. Email campaigns usually have an auto responder set up which will send follow up emails to the mail from the original recipient or responder. This cycle may be repeated for a specified number of times.

There are various tests to determine whether an email campaign is working effectively or not. They are

• Always maintain a control message. If you want to really check if a change to an email actually has an effect on the response rates the best way to go about it would be to compare it with a control group. The process of testing email is so easy that inexperienced marketers are tempted to test multiple facets of a message at once. This is not advisable. Altering one part of the message, and then comparing it to the email with the best response so far would prove far more effective. Testing more than one facet unnecessarily complicates things.

• Try and Test significant differences. It is better to ensure what you’re testing differs significantly from the control group. For example, Instead of slightly rewording your offer, it is better to try one hard sell and one soft sell. Or better still send one message with a discount and one without. Over a period of time, alter the size of the discount.

• Test formatting. Silverpop an Email service provider recently did a study which showed that consumers receive a large number of poorly formatted HTML messages because the sender did not test appearance in different email software. Unless and until you have a lab with a complete array of email clients, it’s better to let your service provider perform this function.

• Always start with the basics. A lot of people still receive email messages from large companies that leave the sender line, subject line, or both blank. This is one of the best ways to kill response. Imagine receiving in the mail a credit card solicitation in a plain white envelope with no return address. Marketers who are just beginning to test their messages should begin with altering subject lines. Do you personalize it? Include an offer? Is the offer dollars off or percent off? A hard or soft sell?

• A pre-test is an excellent way to find out what works before sending the email to your entire list. This knowledge can greatly improve your overall response rate. It also protects you from sending a poor performing email test to a large portion of your list—and wasting your efforts. To pre-test, choose a random sampling of 100 people from your master list, then split that in half and send each half one of the two test campaigns.

These tests will help you determine whether your email campaign is effective or not. From these tests you have to select the best email. You also have to keep in mind that you have to send different types of emails to different consumer categories for your email campaign to be successful.