"There are a number of different things that can be tested including the length of the email, the type of offer, the format of the email, the tone used in the email, and even the time of day the email is sent."

This article exposes one secret method to increase your email marketing conversion rates fast and easy.

Are you shooting from the hip when you send out a commercial email? Do you simply write up a single email and then fire it off to your list and wait to see if you make any sales? If so, you could be leaving thousands of dollars on the table.

The sad fact is that most email marketers today perform their campaigns this way. With the cost of sending emails so cheap, why bother creating an effective, high converting email, when you can send another email out to your list in a couple days?

You don't need to send more emails to your list to increase profits (and risk an increase in the number of people that unsubscribe). By performing some simple, straightforward testing, you can dramatically increase your conversions.

Here's an example:

Let's say you have a list of 30,000 subscribers and you want to get the highest conversion possible. You would first start by optimizing the number of people that open the email. This is probably one of the most important steps; after all, how can your sales letter sway people if they don't even open the email?

Instead of emailing a sales pitch to all 30,000 subscribers, you would send four or five separate emails to 500 people from the list, each with its own subject line. For the sake of this example let's say you send four separate emails, so that's 2,000 emails sent.

You would then track the open rate for each type of email. Let's assume that the four subject lines had the following open rates:

1. 17%

2. 3%

3. 9%

4. 12%

As you can see, there's quite a big difference between the best and worst subject lines with respect to open rates.

So you now have a subject line that you can use, now what?

You now test different aspects of the email body. There are a number of different things that can be tested including the length of the email, the type of offer, the format of the email, the tone used in the email, and even the time of day the email is sent.

For this example, let's say you're testing the difference between using a soft sell and a hard sell. So, you would send out an email with the soft sell to 1,000 subscribers and then send out an email with the hard sell to 1,000 subscribers ' both using the best subject line from your first test ' and track the number of sales generated from each. It is important to use a separate tracking code in each email so you know where the sales were generated.

Let's say that the first email with the soft sell generated 6 sales and the second email with the hard sell generated 2 sales. This would give you a 3.5% conversion rate for the first email (17% open rate x 1000 = 170 => 6 sales / 170 = 3.5%) and a 1.17 % conversion rate for the second email (17% open rate x 1000 = 170 => 2 sales / 170 = 1.17%).

Now that you have the highest converting email body and the best subject line, you can send your email to the remaining 26,000 subscribers from your list!

If you're not convinced this testing is worth it, just plug the amount per sale you would be making into the numbers above. Use the worst subject line along with the lowest converting email body and compare your results to the best subject line along with the highest converting email body. You will be shocked by the difference!

Don't over-sell your list in an attempt to increase your sales. The next time you run an email campaign, remember to follow these effective testing guidelines and skyrocket your conversions - and your profits.

Copyright (c) 2008 PSD Investments LLC