Hands-On Live Test Lab: How to improve your already successful marketing

VolunteerMatch is an American nonprofit organization whose Web services aim to make it easier for people looking to volunteer with good causes. In this interactive session, the marketing team at VolunteerMatch was trying to figure out how to make it easier for people to find and trust them. To accomplish this goal, they conducted a 24-hour experiment live at Email Summit 2015.

VolunteerMatch Solutions is a product focused on reaching brands, companies and schools interested in connecting their employees, customers or students with philanthropic opportunities.

For Tessa Srebro, Lead Generation and Marketing Associate, and Lauren Wagner, Senior Manager of Engagement, both of VolunteerMatch, this lead to the question, "What is the most effective way to attract and connect with the right companies who fit our customer profile?"

Readers from MarketingExperiments and Moz competed to write the best subject lines for the following mental levers:

Category 1: Proof, recognition, credibility (i.e., you can get these things by hours tracking, reporting, etc.)

Category 2: More improved opportunities to choose from (i.e., you can get these things by Opportunity Builder, VolunteerMatch Network, etc.)

Category 3: Ease-of-use (i.e., you can get these things by MobileMatch, user-friendly interface, ClientCare Support, etc.)

Category 4: Spread your passion (i.e., you can get this by combining the best of the above)

In this session replay, the marketing team from VolunteerMatch, as well as Jon Powell, Senior Manager of Executive Research and Development, MECLABS Institute, will walk you through a series of exercises that were used to create a marketing experiment focused on learning from customers. Next, they explore the most effective next step and reveal how one audience member's creation performed with their own real audience.

The key ideas behind creating a customer-focused email test like this are to:

• Review your previous tests (especially those with "negative lifts") and try to classify the key mental levers that are implicit or explicit in the hypothesis


• Create a central testing repository so you can extract the most value from your experiments and then distribute that value across your organization


• Train every member of your team to recognize a proper test design

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