Is there a best email subject line or send time?

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on January 09, 2008

How to write a winning subject line and choose the right day to send your email are two of the crunch topics in email marketing.

Step forward a new case study which looks at both. MarketingSherpa reports on how the Organic Dish determined the best approach in each case.

The article is noteworthy for illustrating the pitfalls that await the casual student of subjects and send times.

Take the former. While it's generally agreed that shorter subject lines are better, this can suck you into thinking size is everything. But it's just one factor. The actual words themselves are pretty important, no?

In the case study, a slightly longer subject line proved best because of the power of the call to action it contained.

This is why everyone encourages you to test. Because the only real way to know what works is to test the alternatives and see what works.

It's a point Karen Gedney repeats in her look at B2B lessons from the email campaigns of US presidential candidates.

Among the many sound tips, she suggests you may find value in changing sender names. Again, test carefully. Sender name recognition is vital to open rates and preventing unsubscribes and spam reports. So any benefits from the occasional name change need to outweigh the possible damage you might do to recognition.

This issue is also tackled by Janine Popick in a new blog post. She explains how you can migrate from one sender name to another gradually...so this name recognition is not compromised.

Back to the case study...

The other issue addressed is best day to send. A while back I posted a three point approach to this:

1. Check the various statistics and reports on "best day to send" to get some insight on the topic.

2. Make your own educated guesses as to the days your target audience are most likely to have the time and motivation to open, read and act on your email.

3. Test them to see which gives the best results.

This is exactly what The Organic Dish did with great success. The key is not to take benchmark "best day to send" statistics too literally, but to treat them as one of the pieces of information you use to decide which days you want to test.

EmailKarma has a nice post describing how to set about testing weekdays to find the sweetspot for your own program.

If that regime seems too much effort, then use the steps outlined above to narrow your choices down to the two or three most likely "best days" and just test these alternatives, rather than looking at a whole week.

Also, don't forget to go back to the topic down the road and test again. User habits change over time, with the season and as your audience composition itself changes. The best day to send email in Winter 2007 may not be appropriate for Spring 2008.

Tags: email marketing, email frequency, best day to send email

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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