A/B tested subject lines for 3 months. Everything I thought I knew was wrong.

I was sure personalization like first names in subject lines would crush generic ones. Ran tests on 12,000 emails for a local shop here in Austin. Turns out curiosity gaps and weird emojis beat name drops every time. Anyone else find their gut instincts totally backfired with data?

2 comments

2 Comments

piper1753d ago

Huh, that's interesting. I think the bigger story here is that we're probably overthinking our subject lines especially for small local audiences. When I tested similar stuff back in 2022, I found that overly clever subject lines actually hurt open rates because they felt like spam. The local customers I target want to feel like they're getting a real message from a real person, not a marketing machine. Maybe the personalization fails because it's too obvious and reads as fake. Simple stuff like "Hey, about that thing you asked" out performed everything else in my tests.

ben4363d ago

Oh COME ON. So you're telling me I spent six months convincing myself that adding "Hey [First Name]" was the secret sauce and all I really needed was a winking emoji and a question mark? That's EMBARRASSING. I feel personally attacked by these results and I'm not even the one who ran the test. My entire email strategy is built on lies and I refuse to accept it until I run my own tests and get the same humiliating outcome.