Email4Thought

Use of Personalisation in Subject Lines

At the DMA's 'The Practical Guide to Email Marketing' conference' earlier this week, Stephanie Miller from Return Path did a great presentation and briefly addressed the question should personalisation be used? Her findings were: Yes for UK subscribers, No for German subscribers and no for US subscribers as they find it spammy.

Last week Suretymail's, Ann P Mitchell came up with 3 reasons that personalising your subject lines can kill your email deliverability which is a very interesting read and this week Stefan Pollard has also approached this subject - but from a different angle with his article: Personalized Subject Lines: Benefical or Bad?

There are alot of valid points in both sides of the argument - but what it probably comes down to is testing (yes, yes I know - it's a boring answer!). However, what works for you mightn't work for someone else. A lot of the success of the personalisation comes down to your relationship with your subscriber. If you haven't got a real 'relationship' with your subscriber as such then maybe personalising isn't the way to go as they may see it as being artificial or spammy.

So, if in doubt -test.

Originally Posted: DMA Email Blog

Subject Lines - Length Does Matter

Alchemy Worx are about to release their new whitepaper on Subject Lines, in this week's Infobox, and it has some very interesting (and possibly quite controversial) findings. The study was conducted on 646 subject lines across 205 million messages earlier this year. By repeating the strategy behind MailerMailer's Email Marketing Metric Report (2008), they were able to achieve the same findings as MailerMailer, however, when analysing the subject lines in more detail, the results became very different. Some of the findings in this report are:

• Shorter subject lines optimise open rates
• Longer subject lines tend to optimise click and click-to open rates.

They also analysed not just the number of characters, but also the relationship between the number of words within a subject line and its open and click rates and found there to be similiar results. The report also then goes onto look at why this would be so and discusses what I think to be the most interesting finding in this study - that the longer the subject/the more words which are used, result in the 'right' type of people opening the email i.e the subscriber is given enough information to be able to determine whether the email is relevant to them and hence is more likely to take action and click through. For a sneak preview of the whitepaper, before its release later this week, you can download it here: http://www.alchemyworx.com/subjectlines-lengthiseverything.php Originally Posted: Be Relevant

Labels: report, subscriber lines