Inbox Insider: Testing and segmentation helped Mint.com increase e-mail open rate

There's nothing better for an e-mail campaign than a marketer who considers the details. Extra thought about the time an e-mail is sent, personalization and segmentation of marketing messages' content can increase engagement and interest in a brand.

For Mint.com, this kind of attention to detail has helped it increase the response rates of its various e-mail programs. The online financial services firm has 1.5 million users and four different types of e-mail communications with those customers, based on their preferences. Mint.com began working with e-mail service provider Silverpop about six months ago, and since then it has employed a number of detail-oriented strategies.

Mint.com looked at the ideal send time of its e-mails in a move to optimize the open rates. After A/B tests, it found that e-mails sent using send-time optimization technology, which judges the best time for an e-mail based on a consumer's past click behavior, had a 10% higher open rate than those sent at a fixed time.

In a recent campaign Mint.com conducted to promote its iPhone application, the company segmented by iPhone owners and tested two different subject lines to figure out which one had the higher response. Afterwards, it sent the best-performing subject line to the entire group and found the open rate was almost twice as high as its average e-mail open rate for 2009.

It pays to pay attention.