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. 

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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

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