Blog, Email Marketing Studies

How subject length and personalisation affect key metrics

13 November 2017 Comments Off on Cómo afecta la longitud y la personalización del asunto a las principales métricas


The marketing service provider Yes Lifecycle Marketing has analysed how different variables such as subject line length, use of personalisation, message type and industry affect open and click metrics. The results are available in this link.

Personalisation
At  previous posts We have already presented the results obtained after testing two issues, one with name personalisation and one without personalisation.
They showed the positive impact of personalisation in terms of open rate and click to rate. The Yes Lifecycle Marketing study shows that personalised subject lines generated 50% more opens and 58% more CTOs than non-personalised subject lines.
Another interesting fact is that the cases in which the personalised variable has been different from the name are the ones that have obtained the best results. Some examples of this type of personalisation are:

  • Sender personalisation: Ivy, Marie sent you a gift
  • Personalisation of your favourite team: Kick Off Baseball Season with The Fighting Mongooses Branded Tees!
  • Personalisation of the points accumulated in a loyalty programme: You're 290 points away from earning a West Advantage Rewards Certificate!
  • Expiry date: Will You Need Home Insurance After June 20th, 2017?

Length
Another interesting aspect analysed by the study is the impact of subject line length. It should be noted that with the widespread use of mobile screens, the length of the subject line has gained prominence as a variable that affects open rates. One of the reasons for this is the limited number of characters that mobile screens tend to support. For example, according to a Litmus research on the length of subjects, in order to fit within the limits of mobile screens, subjects should be a maximum of 35 characters.
If we look at the table below, we can see that only 5% of the analysed emails had a subject between 1 and 20 characters. However, they are the best performers with a CTO of 12.9%.
 

Source: Yes Lifecycle Marketing

Each industry, brand and audience are different, so it does not make sense to take these data as a universal reference. We believe that the most interesting thing to do is to take them as a starting point for analysis and testing in each particular case to improve email marketing metrics.