A US based stock trading portal optimizes the banners to increase CPC revenue

A US based portal on which you can trade American stocks optimized the banners to increase CPC revenue.

"In every email that we send, we provided space for third party content. And we are remunerated on CPC basis. So for us it is important  that we select the best revenue generating banners", says the Marketing Director of Trade Co*. "Thats  why we used 8Seconds email optimizer to find out which content works best in our emailcampaigns."

How does it work?
TradeCo received several banners from different advertisers and used the real time optimization service of 8Seconds to optimize the emailcampaigns. When the entire emailcampaign has been sent out, 8Seconds showed these different banners to the people opening their email and measured which banner clicks best. The best banner was found quite quickly thanks to the very big differences in conversion.

The Results:
Let's have a look at the results of the 5 skyscrapers below.

CTR: 0.07%	0.11%	0.19%	0.34%	0.41%

The best skyscraper performs 445% times better than the worst one! 8Seconds needed 3% of the recipients to decide on the winning banner, so 97% remaining readers only saw the best banner.
Needless to say that the revenues, based on CPC were also 445% higher than when we would have chosen the worst performing banner.

And some very nice side-effects:
TradeCo increased their revenues substantially from the advertisers by selecting the best banner and the best advertiser. This of course increased the negotiation power towards advertisers as they immediatly could attach a value to each banner and advertisers.
But the second side effect was more surprising: we noticed that our open rates started to increase since we started optimizing our 3rd party banners. Apparently showing better banners increased the relevance and the value for the recipients which triggered them to open our emails more often.

What did really surprise us?
Firstly TradeCo noticed a very big difference in click behaviour between banners in email campaigns and websites. So the best banner on a webpage, does not necessarily has the same results in the emailcampaign.

And secondly the readers seem to suffer from banner blindness, so the less the banner looks like a banner, the higher the clicks. or vice versa, the more the banner is integrated within the general look&feel of the email, the better it will respond.

*Trade Co is of course not the real name of the company. If you would like to know which company this is, then just let us know.