A subject line is one of the main things under an email marketer’s control to influence their customers’ behaviour. Having an ineffective, confusing or overly-clever subject line delivers a poor user experience and can drastically affect response and even lose subscribers. Conversely, getting a subject line strategy right can make responses soar.
The subject line is the key way to get your brand in front of your customers. Even if your email does not get opened, people still see your subject lines, so they deserve lots of attention. Adestra’s research is split into four key sectors: Retail/B2C; Conferences/Events; Media/Publishing; and B2B/Professional Services/Financial.
Retail
Personalised emails are best, right? Actually stats show it can have a negative effect on opens, click and unsubscribe rates for retailers. Personalising is certainly something worth testing, but the point is to sell from your email. If personalisation adds value to the sales funnel, go for it. But if not, focus on your value proposition instead.
Many sales are driven by specific percentage discounts, each of which have a substantial effect on both open and click rates. What’s interesting here is that when the discount gets larger, the open rate is less reliably improved eg ‘15% off’ only boosts click-throughs by 4%, yet cuts unsubscribes by 32%; whereas 50% off boosts click-throughs to 33%, yet only reduces unsubscribes by 13% . One potential explanation is that consumers simply don’t believe large discounts are real.
Conferences/Events
‘Agenda’, ‘Keynote’, ‘Forum’ are all key features in many events, and yet as a subject line they don’t deliver strong open rates. The reason for this is because they focus on the feature and not the benefit.
Massive click-through decay is largely due to a lack of creativity or propensity to experiment with other tests. The problem comes down to event workflows. Generally, the prime registration period comes in the weeks leading up to an event. The last thing marketers want to think about are subject lines! However, this is done at their own peril – considering email is one of the strongest visitor drivers out there, optimising it is your #1 route to increased footfall.
It’s very important to use strong calls to action, even in the subject line, if you want your customers to respond to your invitations. Clearly, some terms (ie. ‘early bird’) are over-used and don’t deliver great value. But take, for example, ‘Buy’. It’s a strong call to action, often associated with retail transactions, but very effective for event invitations as well.
In media and publishing, different purposes are served by email and with differing success. Strong editorial content, when used as a hero topic in the subject line, drives huge response across all metrics. For example ‘Breaking’ enjoys a +35% lift in open rates and +66% for click-throughs.
When selling subscriptions, word choice is paramount and the data shows that offers don’t work every time. It’s important to test and change things on an email-to-email basis. Be careful of ‘25% off’ as that can harm open and clicks, but ‘On Sale Now’ can generate 50% better response.
B2B/Professional Services/Financial
The challenge in this sector is to stand out from the competition in an intelligent way. Bear in mind that B2B product offerings are often complex and the sales cycle is much longer than other industries. However, the various methods available to marketers deliver mixed results.
When unsubscribes happen in the B2B world, it’s much more damaging than in B2C – especially for high-value products with a convoluted sales process. Following an email strategy that reduces unsubscribes is solid. Words such as Bulletin (-260%) and Interview (-98%) perform well, substantially reducing unsubscribers, but iPad (+60%) and Discount (+40%) are to be avoided.
Click here for the full subject line report, including all four sector analyses.
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