Insurance Email Marketing & Multivariate Testing

Insurance email marketing can and should be one of the most powerful lead generation tools in marketer’s tool box. And when it comes to insurance email marketing, multivariate testing offers a highly advantageous methodology to improve results, providing greater insights into email campaign optimization and conversion efficiency. A/B split testing offers a simplistic way understand multivariate testing. Split testing is an empirical approach used to determine optimum conversion rates (click-through rates for example) for an insurance website, landing page, banner ad or email campaign.

Let’s say that an insurance marketer creates two versions of an email campaign (we’ll call them email version A and B) and wants to determine which of these versions has the more effective subject line. The split test works best if the emails are identical except for one modification, which in this case is the subject line. Agency and broker email marketing campaign variations can be can be dramatic or subtle. Each subject line can be completely different, or a one word change can be measured. Agencies can then measure the campaign fundamentals, differentiating including open rate and click-through rate to determine which insurance email marketing campaign was more effective.

For example, if campaign A yielded an open rate of 20% with 10 clicks, and campaign B yielded an open rate of 25% with 14 clicks, then the balance of the emails should use campaign B. What balance you may ask? Multivariate testing can use a small portion of your email marketing contact list. If the marketer used 10% for the A/B test mentioned above, the balance, or in this case the remaining 90%, can then be used to send the superior email, email version B.

Multivariate testing is similar to A/B testing, but can be used to test multiple insurance email marketing iterations at the same time. A simple way of thinking about this is an A/B/C/D split test, with each email using a different subject line. If the click through results of version D are twice as good as the other emails, then the balance of the email can be sent using insurance email version D. Multivariate split testing allows agencies to optimize their insurance email marketing campaigns to ensure optimum effectiveness, from subject lines to calls to action, to content density. Multivariate testing allows insurance marketers to continually measure and refine, and improve their insurance email marketing initiatives, to generate more insurance leads.