DMA Email Marketing Council Blog

Latest research suggests your subject line test strategy needs a complete overhaul!

Last week infobox, the DMA Email Council’s newsletter featured the UK launch of a free white paper on subject line length published by my company Alchemy Worx.

For those of you who haven’t had a chance to read it yet the main findings of the research were pretty startling and run counter to conventional wisdom.

The research suggests that although subject lines with 60 characters or less make more people open your message (the traditional view) these people are less likely to then go on and click on content or offers within the message than people who open an email with a longer subject line. More opens = less clicks! There seems to be an inverse relationship between opens and both click and CTO rates.

As you might expect, we monitor a large number of UK email campaigns, from a cross-section of sectors and companies including British Airways, figleaves, Apple, Amazon JD Sports and Reuters; so I thought it might be interesting find out what subject line lengths email marketers are using and was astonished to find out just how are following conventional wisdom!

Out of 700 subject lines we monitored in the last 90 days, the vast majority—87% of them — were under 60 characters in length. A further 7% fell into the ‘dead zone’ between 60 and 70 character where neither opens nor the CTO rate is optimized, and only 6% of the subject lines were over 70 characters long and therefore likely to optimize click and CTO rates.

Does his mean that everybody out there is only interested in opens and doesn’t care about clicks?  Perhaps we could conclude that email marketers, having extensively and regularly tested longer subject lines, know for a fact that they don’t work?

Somehow I think not.

What’s more likely to be the case is that as an industry we’ve done such a fantastic job of believing the hype that we have stopped testing outside of the accepted norms.

Our whitepaper also found subject lines with a higher word count also optimize clicks and CTO rates. So how do the numbers break down when it came to word count?

The numbers are equally amazing. Only 13% of subject lines monitored contained above 10 words—where clicks and CTO are optimized. 60% fell into the ‘dead zone’ of between 6 and 10 words, where neither clicks nor opens are optimized; and 26% of the subject lines contained fewer than 6 words, and therefore optimized open rates.

What I have learned from this exercise and would like to share with you all is that email marketers need to completely overhaul their subject line test strategy:

● Subject line tests should be more granular—long and short just isn’t good enough. Subject lines need to be broken down into more character groupings (1-10, 11-20, ...91-100).

● Introduce word count testing. Words are a much better way of conveying meaning than characters.

● Assess the impact of the number of propositions contained in the subject line on your campaign performance.

● Finally, open rates are just a small part of the story. Your tests should assess the impact of subject lines on clicks, CTO rate and conversions, as well as sales.

My greatest fear is that the people reading the whitepaper will be looking for a simple answer such as “when it comes to email subject lines, short is best”, when in fact the central message is keep searching, keep optimising and keep on challenging assumptions.

Dela Quist
CEO
Alchemy Worx

B2B marketers accelerate use of email marketing

B2B marketers accelerate use of email marketing.

Recently we conducted a survey with B2B Marketing magazine and found that UK businesses are increasing their use of email to engage with both customers and prospects. Over three quarters (78%) of UK B2B marketers consider email to be either a "critical" or "very important" part of their marketing mix. And, of the 175 B2B marketers who completed the survey, 68% believe that the versatility of email is on the increase and are integrating email more into the overall marketing mix.

Over 70% of B2B marketers said that the number of email campaigns and the volume of email they send has increased in the last year. Clearly this shows that marketers are growing in confidence in their use of email. But as they increase the number of campaigns and the volume of email they are sending, companies must strike the right balance and strive to send only timely, targeted and relevant emails.

Interestingly, the results of the survey also highlighted that most B2B marketers are only using the minimum personalisation in their email marketing. Less then a quarter (22%) use more than just name to personalise their email and as few as 16% are using dynamic content. Segmentation and personalisation allows for more targeted and relevant emails, which are key for B2B marketers to engage readers and achieve the best ROI possible from their email marketing. There is clearly a lot of room for improvement through to get the maximum benefits from email marketing.

According to the survey, the biggest challenges facing email marketing are "Inbox overload" and "Spam undermining the medium". A wanted and valued email is always welcome in the inbox. This is why it is so important for marketers to create campaigns and relationship emails that are coming at the right frequency, with the right information and to the right individuals. These types of emails will always cut through the clutter and get opened.

For more information visit www.newsweaver.co.uk/press_b2bsurvey.php

Denise Cox
Newsletter Specialist
Newsweaver

Getting opened in the business inbox

The way people handle their business inbox has changed a lot over the last few years. This impacts how you should craft your content, the subject line and the from. It also highlights how your permission gets challenged every time you appear - and how your emails must not over step the boundaries of the relationship (i.e. too frequent), and are relentlessly relevant to their business needs.

People delete, read now or read later. There are different levels of ‘delete’: If you’ve annoyed them by being too frequent, not recognised, or not relevant (even if you once were) they might mark you to automatically end up in the junk box. If you’ve really bugged them by overstepping the boundaries of the relationship or wasting their time - they’ll take the time to unsubscribe. If you’ve crossed the line with them, you’ll be reported as spam (hello black list!).

Other things to take into consideration - they’re obvious, because it’s how most of us handle email:

• You are competing with lots of emails from the recipient’s co-workers, their own clients, notifications (social networking, forum replies, etc) along with all the emails they’ve subscribed to, all the emails they don’t recall signing up to - and the pure out-and-out nasty spam.
• The from and subject line are critical. Rarely do people open emails they’re not sure about simply out of curiosity.
• Using false urgency in subject lines annoys people. Do this once and you will lose the trust of the busy subscriber. Use the subject line to help them assign a priority to your mailing. If it is time sensitive, have the end date listed. If it is a useful e-newsletter, but not time sensitive, highlight this - along with indications of content, so the reader knows to set it aside and read later.
• In B2B we have found that people open an email newsletter they signed up for on average about 1 in every 3 mailings. There are many reasons for this, time being one of them. Another is they’ve been out of the office for a couple of days and simply clear out the inbox and start fresh.
• We’re always sifting, scanning, sorting, deleting or moving into folders. The inbox is scanned by people with a hair trigger mouse just waiting to delete if they don’t immediately recognise the email.
• Recipients do know how to set aside emails that they’re subscribed to - and will read them later. That includes e-newsletters which don’t need to be digested on a handheld on the road and are saved for viewing at a desk. Sometimes they open and read emails days, even weeks later. This contributes to the longer tail B2B marketers are seeing in their stats. No longer is it just the 24-72 hour window of activity. Be sure to trend activity weeks and months after a send.
• Storage space is not much of an issue these days - people rarely get ‘inbox full’ messages. In the old days we were always deleting emails to make room for new ones. Now with GBs of space available, and a good search functionality in most email software, people have acquired a habit of saving emails to search through and find specific items / products/ services at a later date. Often to print out and bring to a meeting. This means email newsletters and communications have a much longer shelf life then the previous read-or-delete era.

Jennifer Curtin, Head of Marketing, Newsweaver