The Company
Since 1958 Peter Glenn has been providing exceptional customer service and carrying some of the best outdoor gear available. With its roots in Vermont, the company knows how important it is to be warm, dry, and comfortable, and how the right outdoor gear can make or break a trip. 

The Challenge
Peter Glenn Ski & Sports has been a Silverpop customer since 2008.  Even though it has a very successful email program in place, the company wanted a better understanding of how it could optimize its emails to help increase overall ROI on their sends.

“In the past we wanted to do testing but didn't have the time or tools to confirm with statistical certainty which email was a ‘winner’” said David Mahoney, director of marketing, Peter Glenn Ski & Sports.

The Solution
After having attended a presentation on testing techniques at the Silverpop Client Summit, Mahoney decided to give it a try on one of his upcoming promotional emails using Silverpop partner, 8Seconds. 8Seconds’ Optimizer technology optimizes images in emails based upon recipients’ behavior post-send. 8Seconds shows different images to different recipients who open their email and measures statistically and in real time which image is the most successful in terms of clicks or conversion. It automatically shows this best image to the next recipients who still have to open their email at that moment in time.

For the test, Peter Glenn decided to do a comparison of two different header graphical images for one of its promotional emails on water sports. The first email is product-focused showing all of the items on sale that week. The second email is lifestyle-focused showing people performing fast-paced water sports. See the images below used for testing:



Using 8Seconds, a test was conducted and both of the header images were exposed to the control group opening their emails to measure which one worked best. 8Seconds only needed 2,767 readers to determine the winning image with a 100-percent statistical validity. All the remaining recipients only saw the best converting header image.

The Results
The results were both surprising and impactful in that the lifestyle-focused email was the better performing email overall with a whopping 63-percent increase in click rate. “We all thought that the first image, showing the products that are for sale, would work best but it was the lifestyle image that resulted in a significant lift in click rate,” said Mahoney. “We are very impressed with the 8Seconds technology. Setup takes no longer than five minutes and our promotional emails are improved on the fly! We are curious to see the results of our future tests that we have planned for our triggered emails.”

Download the PDF to learn how Peter Glenn used 8Seconds' Optimizer technology to increase click rates by 63% through real time testing.