Lame title, useful post.

So, when sending an email campaign to your subscribers, what subject line do you choose:

- “John, I just sent you a nice free ebook”

or

- “Just sent you a nice free ebook”

The exact same line, except for the subscriber’s name in the first one. One would normally think the first one will perform better, right?

It’s logical: The subscriber sees that you know his name and thinks that the mail is legit.

But after performing a split test on 2 websites with different topics (can’t share them, but I can tell that one is a free coupons site and one is a niche blog for photoshop & photography tips), I found out that logic doesn’t apply to marketing (or at least email marketing).

The subscribers were split 50/50 in 2 lists, and the same email campaign was sent to both, with the only difference being that the first half of subscribers got the subject line with their name inserted, and the second half got the “nameless” subject line.

Results?

On the free coupons site, the open rate was higher by 2% for the nameless subject lines.

The photoshop & photography tips site got a 4% increase of the open rate (quite a difference in any type of marketing).

As a side effect, we got more clicks from the second list on each site.

2-4% may not seem much, but if you convert that to numbers, it becomes clear why this can make a difference: For a list of 4500 subscribers, 3% means 135 subscribers. If you can make an average of $1 monthly (usually email marketers make more) from each subscriber, that is a $135 increase, enough to pay for the mail services & a few domains, for example.

I thought of several plausible reasons for this:

1. The almost-fact that every email that starts with your name is either spam, commercial or both. And it’s not only people who think this. Some content+reputation-based spam filters take it to the extreme and flag any messages from unknown IP’s which contain a name. The ones that aren’t flagged are usually from big corporations or ISP’s. The reason for this is lame but kinda true: Most people that send a personal email do not write the recipient’s name in the subject field (studies show that most of the times the name is written in the body of the email).

2.  Sometimes, people do not write their name in the Name field. This is so true for anyone who has an email subscribers list. Just look at some of the names in our lists: Cedaroak12 (probably nickname), meatk (wth?), jvrry (most probably a misspelling), razer (another nickname), angie L (not as bad as the rest)…

How would the subject line (and the greeting in the body) look in this case?

- “Cedaroak12, here’s the best way to write an email” -

- ” Hi jvrry, another gift from our company” -

The subscriber will think that the morons who sent the email don’t even know how to write his name. And there’s little chance that he’ll use the link provided in the email to change his subscription details). Most likely, they’ll click “Spam” and forget about it.

This problem should be taken into consideration, but the best way to know which will work best for you is to test, test & experiment.