Epsilon
 Epsilon Insights Newsletter
July 2009 
    Epsilon Insights Newsletter Best Practices
Volume 1.1     

 
Best Practices

The Art of the Subject Line
Break Through the Clutter: Real-Time Messaging

If your schedule permitted you to attend our webcast titled, The Art of the Subject Line, you learned the best practices behind crafting a subject line in an email to get your customers to open it and want more.

According to research conducted by team members of our Strategic and Analytic Consulting Group, the subject line continues to be the single most important factor of an email due to its influence of opens, clicks and conversions. Yet, many email marketers are unable to capitalize on this fact by either not consistently testing subject lines for their email program or by misapplying the correct principles of subject line testing and design.

The 11 Steps to Subject Line testing include:

  1. Planning ahead—Subject line testing needs to be incorporated into the deployment calendar.
  2. Testing only one subject line element at a time
  3. Creating test cells—Test cells should be appropriately sized for the metric being studies and created of randomly selected consumers.
  4. Deploying the test—All test versions should deploy at roughly the same time and via the same IP address.
  5. Picking the winner—The winner is determined by comparing results after a pre-determined period of time, say 24 hours.
  6. Deploying the winner to the hold-out group.
  7. Documenting findings.
  8. Tracking metrics over time to document success.
  9. Cross-applying findings—This means taking what you’ve learned in one situation and applying that to a similar situation or using learnings from one brand and applying them to a different brand.
  10. Retesting concepts at regular interval.
  11. And not getting discouraged.
    12.

Different factors will work for different brands in different situations, so it’s essential to test. But every email marketer should test the following factors:

  1. Framing the subject line as a group of tips, tricks, lists or secrets.
    2.
  2. Incorporating a sense of urgency into the subject line.
  3. Including personalization.
  4. The overall length of the subject line.
  5. The use of numbers, symbols and other formatting tricks.
  6. Using the brand name inside the subject line.
  7. What’s know as the “compound” subject line.
  8. Piquing curiosity.
  9. Rhetorical questions.
  10. Word order.
  11. Subject line tone.

A systematic and conscientious approach to subject line design and testing will improve performance for any marketer, even in a down economy.

To read the full whitepaper, please click here. If you’d like to receive a copy of the webcast presentation, please contact your account teams.

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