Strategies are always changing in the world of marketing; like an old t-shirt, some methods become more transparent as time goes on and can become repugnant to some consumers. I use the clothing analogy as I’m well known for hanging onto t-shirts for a decade - they do literally become quite transparent and yes, my family does find them rather repugnant :)

An example of what was a sure-fire strategy for coaxing people to open an email that seems to be rapidly losing popularity: personalization of the subject line - specifically; using the recipients name.

Some email marketing authorities are suggesting that using a recipient’s name in the subject line is becoming quite ineffective and just takes up valuable space that’s better used to describe the contents of the email.

This trend away from personalizaton is supposedly due to the number of spammers who also use this ploy and people are consequently just becoming totally immune to it. Instead of sparking recipients to take the desired action; i.e. opening the email, it may actually be creating a “suspicious” flag in their minds.

So what’s the most effective subject line strategy currently?

In a single sentence, it can be best summed up as being: “Keep it short and tell them what’s inside, don’t sell them what’s inside”.

Seems I have a bit of catch-up study to do on crafting subject lines, which was flagged by an article on the subject I’ve just perused. It wasn’t just the content of the article itself, but also a great collection of other recently published materials on the subject linked to at the end of the Email Marketing Reports piece. Well worth taking a peek.

Related:

Gauging email open rates
Click tracking - software and tips
Marketing - Email delivery issues