success stories

The online sales team at Masa International, a successful overseas property agency with offices in a number of European countries, don't sit on their laurels; they're constantly looking to build on any previous successes.

Their monthly email newsletter showcasing new property for sale, to UK residents looking to move abroad, was already receiving a respectable open and click-through rate – on average around 30% and 45% respectively.

However, they wanted to keep those numbers moving upwards and generate more leads for their sales team.

Monitoring clicks on the content of their campaigns, they knew that it was engaging those who opened it, so their next logical step was to get more people actually opening the message.

Creating a good first impression

They decided to concentrate on optimising the first point of contact their campaigns had with recipients – the subject line.

Traditionally the way to do this would be to split up the database into a number of lists, send each the same message with a different subject line and run a post-campaign report to see which worked best.

The major disadvantage to this method is you can only know which subject line elicits the best response after the delivery has finished. If you send three and only one works really well, you've lost the opportunity to get the same level of response from two-thirds of your database.

Taking out the guesswork

Masa found a better way – plugging an automatic subject-line testing function into their email marketing program (PureResponse).

Using this they could enter a selection of subject lines and, on pressing send, only an initial selection of the database would be tested for their responses.

After an hour, and determining which line had been most successful, the software delivered the campaign to the rest of the database applying that subject line.

In a recent campaign they gave the program three subject lines, two personalised and one non-personalised:

• [customised to recipient's name], our latest Spanish property selection
• [customised to recipient's name], your latest Spanish property update
• The latest Spanish property selection

Reaping the rewards

On initial inspection, the difference between the wording of the subject lines might not seem great, but the results showed otherwise. The second subject line came up as by far the most popular and pushed the open rate of their overall campaign up to 38%.

With click-through rates still holding up, for Masa this increase is significant. People on their database are all opted-in subscribers and once they click on a property, the sales team follow the lead up by phone or email, with a view to arranging an inspection.

Paul Payne, Online Sales Manager, elaborates: 'the additional increase in open rates can mean another couple of inspection visits.

'We're quite high value, so effectively this equals another sale – that's a serious thing for us. Put it this way, one more sale covers our email marketing costs for the rest of the year.'