There are regular debates in email marketing that go round and round and round. Like whether it is better to email on Monday or Tuesday, in the day or in the night.
Such debates first show one set of results and then another – probably because everyone reads the latest research and follows that route – and then recipients react in a different way.
Their problem is that they start from the notion that it is possible to define a good email in terms of mechanics. Do x and you get y response.
But life isn’t like that – although many people continue to believe it is, as witness the fact that another such topic has recently been doing the rounds:
· Shorter email subject lines get higher open and click through rates than longer subject lines.
Before we even get into this, we can dismiss the “open” rates issue, because research has shown over and over again that open rates are meaningless. They are not even consistent when measured by the same software.
If you want to know more about this, see the Hamilton House free report on open rates at http://www.hamilton-house.com/free%20reports/OpenRates.htm In that report we not only take our own evidence but also evidence from a completely separate set of experiments in the US. After reading that you’ll wonder why you ever thought open rates were interesting in the first place!
But click through rates are a better measure of what is happening in terms of your email marketing, and so it is interesting to see where a debate on the relationship between click throughs and the subject line leads.
Research from Epsilon in January 2009 suggests that although there is a link between subject line length and click through, there is just as much importance in what the words say (or “word order” as they rather cutely put it) and click through.
Their analysis involved more than one billion emails over nearly 20,000 separate campaigns – so it ought to be informative.
But in the end it suggests that the relationship between subject-line length and open and click rates is not as strong as previously argued – which really is no surprise at all.
The reason it is no surprise is quite simply that in communications between humans, meaning is always of greater importance than length. I might talk for an hour, and bore you stupid – which would lead people like Epsilon’s researchers to suggest that long speeches are hopeless.
On the other hand if I were addressing a political audience and I had the fluency and wit of Lloyd George 100 years ago, I would hold the audience spell bound for an hour, two hours – as long as I wanted.
Likewise a couple of careful chosen sentences can change someone’s opinion – or confirm their belief that you are really silly. It all depends what you say. (And of course the “word order”).
If you give a person an email to read, and it is stunningly exciting and interesting, that interest will overcome any thought of length.
So although some people can find a high correlation of subject line length to clicks, the reason almost certainly is not in the line length but in the meaning of the text.
This is supported by the fact that lots of companies in the Epsilon research found that the relationship between subject email performance to be relatively weak.
Ultimately Epsilon analyzed the content of subject lines and found that “word order”, and “word choice” (ie the meaning), along with the relationship between the advertiser and the audience were much more important than length – despite the fact that research in recent years has focussed on length.
So we are making progress, although many companies continue to take a highly mechanistic view of email marketing – as if the English language can be reduced to a set of data based on the words themselves. We may expect at any time now a report that says that subject lines that start with the letter E get higher click through rates than anything else.
Certainly Epsilon are now talking about “positioning the most important elements first” and “front loading subject lines with the most important information” – so an alphabetical analysis may be with us shortly.
Yes, it does make sense to keep the subject line short, because the way people have their email programs set up often means they only read a few of the words. But there is still no reason to forget about the language, and the wonderful things it can do.
We must never forget that subject lines don’t give you much space – but they are locations in which you can be creative, and so can make a difference – rather like the PS in letters.
Of course the title of this piece may have turned you off totally, in which case you probably are not reading this bit. But if you are, it might be because you tend to read things I write – or it might be because you were intrigued. If you were intrigued it was almost certainly not because I used four words instead of six, but because of the “word order”, or (as I would prefer to say) because I used an odd phrase at the top, which looked like it ought to mean something but didn’t.
(I don’t advocate that this trick is used all the time in emails – but it serves to illustrate my point.)
If you’d like to talk about the way “word order” can affect your email, how you can generate higher response rates, and how the subject line and the rest of the text inter-relate, please do give me a call on 01536 399 000.
Alternatively email me a copy of an email you have sent out or are thinking of sending out, and I’ll give you my opinion.
You don’t have to take any notice, of course, but you never know – I might come up with a neat idea.
Hamilton House sells business, consumer and educational email lists, and we can undertake the emailing as well. There’s more details on www.yesmail.org.uk Or call my colleagues on 01536 399 000 – they’ll be pleased to help.
Tony Attwood
Hamilton House Mailings plc