How To Get Higher Email Open Rates By Split Testing Subject Lines

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Are you getting low email open rates?  You maybe making mistakes you don’t even know about.  You can find out with a split test.  You can do split tests with sign up forms, light boxes and you can test out many different elements of your emails to get more successful at email marketing.

One of the easiest things to test is your subject line.  Subject lines are crucial as they are one of the first things people see apart from your name when it hits their inbox.  It could also be the last thing they see of that email.

There’s many variables that you could test when it comes to subject lines.  You need to test them 1 at a time.  You could test:

• Length – Test if shorter or longer works better
• Personalisation – You could use their name or other details
• Use of number – Are they better spelled out or as numbers?
• Quotation marks or other numbers – You could try eye catching or annoying
• Humour – Test to see if your reader like jokes or not
• Scarcity tactics – Test to see if your readers act on urgency

There’s a lot of research out there in terms of what works and what doesn’t.

What to avoid

In short, you want to avoid the spam filter.  Here’s a few things to steer clear of:

• CAPS LOCK in your subject line
• Too much punctuation!!!!!!
• Spammy words like free, winner or profits
• Any combination of these things

What to do instead

You need to convince the reader that your content is worth their time and won’t take up too much of it.  There’s a few key things that accomplish this:

• “How to” headlines
• Headlines with a number, indicating a list
• Simple direct statements
• Headlines that sound like news not an ad
• The use of “you”

Use these tips, consider your variables and run some tests.  Once you do this, you will have much higher email open rates.