Names in subject lines?
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He examines the frequency of the practice, raises a few of the issues and problems involved, highlights a good example and generally gets you thinking about the ins and outs of personalisation per se.
As a professional cynic, I'm not a big fan of personalised emails from people who don't actually know who the heck I am. But that's beside the point. Time for the T word: if in doubt about the usefulness of a tactic...test.
More on subject lines | Tags: email marketing, personalised subject lines, retail marketing
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5 Comments:
Might seem obvious, but this is only an option for those who are hard-as-rock certain of the accuracy of their customer data, and are taking great care of it.
For example, nothing worse than getting an email that starts with "Dear MARK," because you, or they, entered your name all in capitals in their database.
I'd rather not see my name in the email than see it done wrong.
Great blog, btw!
By 
Vero, on
19 March, 2007
I tend to think personalization is OK- but cleaning up first name data is very hard, and usually requires some crafty algorithms on the DB side. It tends to catch the consumer's eyes, and all the reporting I've seen shows that it bumps up the opens.
By Anna, on
03 April, 2007
Does that post my site? Hmm.
By Anna, on
03 April, 2007
Good point vero, I suggest that email publishers DO NOT use names in subject lines unless they carefully and regularly review the database.
My main newsletter has over 8K subscribers, and I make it a point to review the new subscriptions that come through my site.
Sometimes in the NAME field, they enter something bogus/misspelled/mis-capitalized.
40%-50% of the time though, I can look at the EMAIL field, and if it says something like "johnsmith@aol.com", I can go ahead and put "John Smith" in the Name field manually.
I figure that most readers won't even know that I updated their name in my database... they'll just see a more natural greeting when they receive their copy of the newsletter, which is exactly what I'm going for.
If the readers DO notice that I've gone through and updated their entry, I hope they'll take that as a sign that I care about the list, and that I actually do check the names, and notice them as individuals.
Of course if may take me a couple days or weeks between updates, but I get around to it. =D
If nothing else, you can update a blank/garbled NAME field to "Friend" or "Subscriber" if you prefer.
Great OP, and you're correct in saying that testing is the real answer.
In my personal experience, maybe because I try my best to take good care of my subscriber list, adding their name to the subject works for me. YMMV
I'm not really concerned about being seen in the Inbox, I presume they want to see me there (or they'd unsubscribe). But since I do send 8K emails per issue, I'm afraid of getting caught by an over-zealous Bulk filter.
If you're like me, you'll occasionally eyeball scan your Bulk filter, looking for false positives. If I see my name (correctly spelled, hahaha) then that's a big indicator.
If I see that the mail is from a list that I subscribed to, then I can mark it as "Good" in my email app, and add them to my address book.
Or unsubscribe using the link at the bottom of the email, either way.
By MacArthur, on
15 August, 2007
Thanks all. Always good to hear views from the frontline...
By 
Mark Brownlow - Email Marketing Reports, on
15 August, 2007
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