Adopting new digital marketing strategies sometimes requires more drastic changes in order to generate more effective results. However, it’s not always easy to get out of that inertia, that formula already strongly embedded in your routine. The choice of the clothes to work or the content to create an email marketing campaign. This can be justified by the rush of a daily basis and also for lack of knowledge. After all, why change something that already works?

The answer is very simple. It might even work, but there is always a way to improve. This is actually already consolidated. If you want to generate more ROI (return on investment), you have to innovate and renew. Bet on the same formula will not change the results. To understand this more clearly, let's look at a practical example.

Email campaigns of Steam

Do you know the Steam? It’s a service for digital distribution of games with millions of users worldwide. When it comes to email marketing, the staff prepares personalized messages according to your preferences as a gamer. One example is the email sent when one of the games of your "wish list" has some discount. The campaign has always the same design and the same language in the text, it closely resembles the story of Pavlov's dogs waiting for the bell.

This Steam’s email is classic for keeping the visual and textual composition, changing only the featured game. They are simple, little flashy and carry the colors and the brand image around the content, the more relevant point. In the first case, in addition to showing a game that was on your list, there is information about the discount, the original price and the new value, the link to the purchase page and the duration of the offer.

An attempt to add more traffic

After a few years always sending the same email, Steam tried to change a detail to test whether the campaign would generate more traffic to the website. If you look at the image above, it’s practically the same email, except for the lack of information: priceless. There is only a link to the site, if you wanted to learn more about the offer.

The idea behind this test was to see if by eliminating the price of the email, leaving only a link to force the user to go to the website and, consequently, it would generate more traffic and conversions. When people come to the site by an email marketing campaign, the propensity to purchase is much greater.

Returning to our example, after a series of tests Steam realized that lost more interactions than generated visits. So, the good old email returned to the inboxes. This means the change was a failure? Of course it wasn’t. And if the sales had tripled? There is no way of knowing whether a change will work or not, but has only one way to find out: testing.

Conclusion

Although the test didn’t bring the expected result, which was to generate more visits to the website and more conversions, Steam had a valuable feedback: know what users were looking for. If you want to try, this process has a name. It’s the A / B test, which has been shown here on the blog.

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