Can users find a link in my email marketing message?

Electronic direct mail messages — more commonly known in the marketing world as EDMs — are a staple of most online services. They’re well-loved and widely used because there’s still no better way to talk to potential or current customers than email. It’s consistently the lowest common denominator in online communications.

And the good news is that consumers are still very much on-board with email as a distribution channel for almost anything.

With so many organizations relying on EDMs, it’s critical to get the design right. If your holiday sales push or product trial offer depends solely on emails to communicate value and talk to your customers, then some EDM user testing should be central to your QA process.

Just like any user research activity, it’s important to use the right tool for the job. In this example, we used a click test to measure how well participants could complete a specific task related to the EDM concept image. We followed up the click test with a simple Customer Effort Score question, to give us a read on how easy or difficult the task was for participants.

There are lots of other ways to test your EDMs. Test how well people understand your message by using a design survey — or, to track the first impression that your EDM gives a recipient, run a five second test.  

Just like testing web and branding concepts, the only limit of EDM testing is your imagination.

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