How much can you learn about your readers from statistics in newsletters? A lot, actually. Here in the office, we're in an ongoing process where we want to get to know you and all of our readers better. Therefore, we've made a strategy for how testing and conducting statistics and for how use the given information in order to communicate with you in the best way possible.

Back in November, it so happened that I was put in charge of my first newsletter. In it, Ubivox introduced Jeff and myself as new coworkers as well as a new template design in the program. It was exciting!

Properly speaking, I had two goals with the newsletter: to gain views of the newsletter itself and to get clicks on the links in it - I wanted people to have a look at our Facebook and Twitter-profiles, after all.

In my split-test, however, I only focused on views. So the mail that you have most likely read (unless you belonged to the first test-group), was the version that most people opened. Afterwards, David and I found that the other one had actually obtained more clicks. It simply had to do with the way we phrased the subject field. The winning version was named "Ubivox presents: new template for you", whereas the loser, the poor thing, was called "Meet Ubivox online" - afterwards, it was clear to us that this phrasing encourages more views of our online-profiles.

What I learned was that it's a good idea to think about what it really is you want to test. And how you want to achieve that with your newsletter. Therefore, my advice to you is: test one thing at a time. Spend some time figuring out what your purpose is - and how to get there.

We've learned from this - and so, in our latest newsletter we only tested subject fields and views. David would like to say something about what we've found.

Ubivox' newsletters are heavy on text. We are a little special on that account - and we know it. When we send a newsletter, our primary goal is that you, dear reader, read as much of the content as possible. In some cases, e.g. when we mention our Facebook page, we would naturally like for you to click the relevant link; but the content in the newsletter is the most important part.

Therefore, when we do split-tests, we usually measure the view-rate. The version that gets most views in the test group is the one that is sent to the entire list.

These days, we're spending quite some time strategising our future newsletters, and in this process we are trying to find out how to communicate so our newsletters are interesting to open and read. When we sent the last newsletter, we decided to find out if we should be specific and professional or if we can play around with the words a little.

We built two newsletters, where the only difference was the subject field - our control version had the subject field "New website for Ubivox /ScanNet WebShop2 integration" and our test version had "Ubivox presents: old wolf in new clothes". Our hypothesis was that the test version would get more views because the message was not obvious from the subject field alone - and that it, therefore, would 'lure' you, dear reader, to open the newsletter and see what we were referring to. 

It didn't... The image to the right shows the view- and click rate for the test version, on top, and the control version, in the bottom. Remember that the only difference between the two newsletters was the subject field - content, images, design and links were exactly the same.

Not only was the view rate 11% better in our control cersion - the click rate was also substantially better. When the winner was sent 24 hours later, the exact same pattern showed, thankfully. 

So what can we learn from this? You like concrete, professional, and maybe even slightly boring, subject-fields - and split-testing is an easy way of finding out. Had we only followed our gut feeling, our newsletter would not have gotten nearly as much attention.

As you may have read between the lines in Katrine and David's observations, there's a lot of knowledge to be found if you go looking. Here are five suggestions to what could be interesting to know more about:

Remember to only test one thing at a time. Coming up with the perfect formula may take a while - and may have to be done through several newsletters. In return, you gain some incredibly usable knowledge about your specific users and what they react to.

And, for good measure, here's our guide on split-testing one more time. 

As we mentioned, from now on we'll frequently be sending this kind of newsletter, which is slightly more full than usual. They will contain our own experiences as well as tips and pointers for the use of Ubivox during everyday work.

We would love to hear from you: is it hot or not? Which themes would you like us to write about in future newsletters?

You can throw us a couple of lines by answering this e-mail. Your feedback would mean a lot to us.

Best wishes,
David, Mia and Katrine