The magic words of the 'Subject' and their influence on the success of Email Marketing

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Personalization has become a key part of any marketing strategy. The public demands it, as they offer brands too much data about themselves for it to be any other way. More of the same is happening in email marketing.

MailerMailer published a study a few months ago that confirmed this theory: personalizing emails improves the click-through rates of messages. Now, new data provided by MailChimp also suggests the same. The email marketing platform has measured the impact that different factors have on the opening rate by their standard deviation from the mean or norm. The study concludes that personalizing with the recipient's first and last name is the one that has the greatest influence on the success of the message, more than personalizing it only with the first or last name.

To understand the study, MailChimp has clarified that it understands standard deviation as a standardized measure of how much a value deviates from the average open or click rate of emails. Knowing this, it has found that the influence that personalization has varies significantly depending on the industry.

Personalization has a negative effect on the legal industry

There are some where the impact is greater. Institutional 14 year old korean boy whatsapp number and government emails take the lead with a standard deviation of 0.92, followed by creative and service agencies (0.45), politics (0.3), IT and electronics (0.28) and hobbies (0.26). However, in sectors such as marketing and advertising (0.13) or the financial and banking sector (0.11) its influence is much lower, and even in the legal industry it has been found that personalisation has a negative effect and reduces the opening rate of emails (-0.31).

The study also confirms that there are certain words that can have a positive effect on the recipient and encourage them to open it. This is the case of words that give a certain urgency to the message. Apparently, using words such as "urgent" (0.79), "breaking news" (0.68) or "important" (0.55) in the subject line continues to work as a technique. However, MailChimp does not offer data on the impact of repeated and perhaps abusive use of this type of strategy to attract attention.

“Free” subject lines see better open rates

Something similar happens with terms such as "gift" which has a standard deviation of 0.26 above the mean, much higher than the word "free" (0.02). Although, again, the latter has a different behaviour depending on the sector. Thus, curiously, in the field of personnel and human resources, its inclusion in the subject of the email significantly improves the opening rates (0.45), and is also higher in restaurants and hotels (0.11), not so much in e-commerce (0.06). The impact is, however, negative for emails from retailers (-0.04), the banking sector (-0.09) and surprisingly also in the travel and transport sector, where there is a negative standard deviation of -0.25.

The data from the study suggest that recipients are interested in receiving announcements or communications, but not in unsubscriptions. Emails that include the word "announcement" in the subject line have higher than average opening rates (0.46 standard deviation). In contrast, users are less interested in opening an email with a subject line that begins with "cancelled" (-0.4), perhaps because they only need to read the subject line to know all the information they need.

Terms associated with donations are not well received

Finally, it is interesting that all emails associated with words related to charity, donations or charities seem to have a negative impact on opening rates, according to MailChimp. Contrary to what previous studies such as Adestra's have indicated, the word "donate" is the most disliked by email recipients, registering a negative standard deviation of 0.56.

As always, these types of email marketing studies should be taken as a starting point. Given the variations experienced by the figures depending on the sector and industry to which they refer, it is worth considering the statistics but also analysing the real impact they have on the brand in question and carefully studying the data provided by the specific email marketing campaigns that are being carried out.