Lesson: Data-Driven Decisions with Mike Greenfield

Step #1 Optimization: Trial and error and email

Optimization is a big topic. Personally, I've done more on the digest side of things, and so I have a lot of learning there, especially in terms of consumer. One big thing is it's generally much more effective to have one thing in an e-mail that you're going to focus on, and that's the subject of the e-mail and that's most of the body of the e-mail. It doesn't necessarily need to be all the body of an e-mail, but it should be most of the body of the e-mail. Then there's a clear click through action.

With Circle of Moms, my last startup, we would have something like seven tips on making a healthy lunch for your child and that was the subject. Then the body was, "Here are seven tips," and it might show the first one. Then there was a big button to click through and get more, and then below that it might be a bunch of other things, "Here's what's going on in Circle of Moms," but 80% of the clicks or thereabouts, would be on that initial e-mail. Having that one piece of content is huge.

We did a lot of trial and error, yes. We A/B tested, both in terms of the individual e-mails and what is the overall lay out of the e-mail and how much do people click on an e-mail if it looks one way versus another, if we're focusing on one item versus focusing on two items or five items or ten items, as well as each specific piece of content. So we found out maybe a month or two in that one piece of content seemed to work much better than more than one piece of content. Then we would test one piece of content against another, against another, against another,see which one was most effective, and then send that out to more people.