Sneak Preview: 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

Comments

[Al]

One addition to the methodology that needs to be mentioned when considering the validity of Alchemy Worx's findings is that the 646 campaigns were collected over a period of five years.

In that time, open rates have declined dramatically, thus confounding the data. AW's conclusion that longer subject lines work better is built on the unstated premise (derived from a faulty methodology) that a 2003 email campaign is equivalent to a 2008 one. Since this is not true, neither can their claim necessarily be true.

[deepak]

The way to discover and use the best tips to develop your email marketing campaign is to start off with what you already know and then just keep on testing everything in your email campaigns. Both, other people's best email marketing tips and also your own ideas.