Reena Mistry of Adestra picks out the insights for publishers on winning subject lines from their analysis of over 2 billion emails.
“How many times have you spent hours (days?) carefully crafting an email, building in brilliant calls to action, and arranging your graphics “just so” only to tack on a subject line at the last minute, without much consideration to how it might affect your campaign? If you’re like many marketers, you’ve done it far too often.
And with the sea change in email over the recent past, including the rise of mobile, your subject line is increasingly the only chance you’ve got to create a positive inbox impression and convince your readers to open your message. Your subject is your headline after-all.
Adestra wanted to see just what kind of impact adjusting your subject line can have, so we looked at over 2 billion emails, and analysed the results, sector by sector. You can read the results in our full report.
What the analysis really highlighted is that testing your subject line is one area marketers are overlooking – and where they’re potentially missing out on some big wins. More than anything, it showed there is lots of short-run variance in every keyword sample. What matters is that you test things out to your lists, and never stay standing still. What works one week may not work the next, or what works for a list of long-time subscribers may not work for new leads.
Looking at the publishing sector in particular, what keywords can influence your results?
B2B publishing best practice
News, simply put, is no longer newsworthy. If people want to get aggregated news stories, they can access this easily via RSS, or even a Google News alert.
Readers don’t need your newsletter to provide what they probably already get elsewhere. That is, unless your offering is targeted to them and provides a unique slant on things. What people do want is to know about news as soon as it breaks – like the old time hacks called it on Fleet Street, your subject lines need to shout “Extra extra, read all about it!” Words like “Alert” and “Breaking” show extremely positive response.
Content is king
Especially in B2B publishing, where in this day and age we’re all increasingly time-poor, get right to the point and make sure your content really is special. The age of content marketing has desensitised people to things like “reports”, “forecasts” and “intelligence.” As with most trends, everyone has jumped aboard the content marketing train, with mixed results. If the content you are marketing is of low quality, then, low and behold, you’ll get poor results. In all this clutter, the old adage “content is king” is more true than ever.
Below is a list of subject line keywords for B2B Publishing, showing which perform better and worse than average for both opens and clicks.
Best practice in B2C Publishing
B2C publishers are facing a revolution in the way they deliver content to their customers, and it shows – people are no longer after repurposed web content. What they want are things unique to the specific market you specialise in.
This is evidenced quite strongly! “Review”, “Update” and “Special” all test well. But there’s more: users devour “video” content. Package up your content as something special, something they can’t find elsewhere, and shout about it in your subject lines.
Monetising your content
Dealing with money, however, is more of a slippery slope. Consumers have gotten to know your brands as content providers, and the big challenge is effectively monetising it. Try to mix up the subject lines – soft sell for a couple weeks, then go in for the kill with a hard sell. If you don’t ask for the money you’ll never get it, but if you always ask for it you’ll have angry customers!
Below is a list of subject line keywords for B2C Publishing, showing which perform better and worse than average for both opens and clicks.
Of all the digital marketing channels marketers are using today, email still delivers the strongest revenue. Ensure you’re making the most of it by leveraging what your subscribers are telling you they want to read by creating and testing a strategy for your subject lines just as rigorously as you do for the rest of your content.
Adestra are a host sponsor of the SIIA Digital Content & Media Summit, 23-25 September, London, and Parry Malm is running a workshop at the event on the results of their subject line research. Plus he’s running an email roundtable session on all your biggest email marketing questions.