MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

One time­less debate that we have fol­lowed for a very long time is whether it is best to use unique sub­ject lines for your email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns or whether to have a con­sis­tent message. 

Here the con­ven­tional wisdom:

When you repeat the sub­ject line over and over, you don’t give read­ers a com­pelling rea­son to open the email. We believe the best prac­tice is to cre­ate a unique and com­pelling sub­ject line for each issue. Source: Email­L­abs

The above mes­sage is cer­tainly good advice, how­ever, I would say that the best approach tries to do both.  Why?

Peo­ple have very lit­tle time and your cus­tomers are already get­ting bom­barded with hun­dreds of emails from hun­dreds of ven­dords and spam­mer­se­very week.  As a result, if your email is not imme­di­ately rec­og­nize­able, then it will very quickly end in the trash folder or wors it will be flagged as spam.

We did our own test and found out that the best prac­tice is to:

1) Ensure that the From field is very recognizeable

2) Ensure that the sub­ject line is very rec­og­nize­able AND unique

3) Do NOT list the {FIRSTNAME} in the sub­ject line

In the test below, we testedd unique vs. unique and rec­og­nize­able sub­ject lines.  By unique we mean that the sub­ject line included the users FIRSTNAME and that the sub­ject lines did not include a con­sis­tent message. 

The results showed that hav­ing a rec­og­niz­able sub­ject lines did about 25% bet­ter.  How­ever, please note that the sub­ject line still con­tains a unique part (i.e. what is included in the les­son).  Remov­ing the FIRSTNAME also appeared to have a net pos­i­tive effect on con­sump­tion although we will need to run a sep­a­rate test to iso­late the impact of adding / remov­ing the {FIRSTNAME}.

Here are the detailed test results:

As you can see from the detailed tests, hav­ing a clearly rec­og­nize­able sub­ject line is far more impor­tant than includ­ing the per­sons FIRSTNAME.  We boosted the con­sump­tion of our free online lessons by 25% with this small change alone.  

Per­son­ally, I think this is com­mon sense because if you enjoy the first les­son, then all of the fol­low on emails will be far eas­ier to rec­og­nize and you are more likely to click on them if you already know what they are all about. 

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
• What Does Your Order But­ton Say? — August 29th, 2008
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
• Are small busi­nesses drop­ping out of AdWords? — July 23rd, 2008

About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

If you want to see what's in the private lab...

Ask yourself... which part of your business would you most like to improve?

I can send you 7 tactics related to your specific needs, if you like.

You don't have to buy anything, just take it as a backstage pass into our private course.

Will it give you the solution you've been waiting for?

There's only one way to find out.