Personalizing your email subject lines can drop your conversion rate . . .

Building on our last post about optimizing your email conversion rate, the 10th eMail Marketing Metrics Report came out and contains many points that you can use to help increase your conversion rate and optimize your email campaigns.

But beware, there are some traps in their data that can lead your conversion rate astray – let’s start by looking at a few of their key points:

Personalization can work against your conversion rate . . .

This study included more than 900,000,000 email messages, and it looks conclusive – get personalization out of your subject line, but use it in your email body to increase your open-rate & click-through-rate conversion.

While the graph above shows only opens, the original study also concludes that personalizing the message ONLY will also improve click-through rates.

If you’re asking yourself how message-only personalization could help over the baseline when people haven’t even had a chance to read it, the answer probably lies in personalized email cuts through spam filters more effectively.

Sunday gets the best open rates and click through rates . . .

In the graph below, the top lines indicate open-rate, while the bottom lines indicate click-through rate. It appears that Sunday is the sweet spot for getting people’s attention.

What this study overlooks and how it may lead you astray . . .

While metrics like open-rate and click-through rate are crucially important, often times they don’t tell the whole story.

For instance our data mirrors the eMail Marketing Metrics Report that shows that Sunday outperforms Tuesdays by a good margin for both open-rates and click-through rates.

However, we’ve found that sending emails out on Tuesday mornings around 7:30am PST drives the most responses or sales for the majority of our clients.

The fact of the matter is that Tuesday seems to be the sweet spot to ask somebody to actually take an action – something that the eMail Marketing Metrics Report does not take into account.

So we’ll leave you as usual with the advice to build tests around this report, but never lose sight of your most important metric: your conversion rate.

Edit – A reader just pointed out that we missed another interesting statistic “Subject lines of 35 characters or less tend to receive 52% higher open rates . . .” – care of the Daily Conversions blog.

P.S. – Yes, we can help you increase your conversion rate . . .

If you want to drastically improve your website’s conversion rate, or your email conversion rate but haven’t had the time – contact us today  to find out how our team of 20+ conversion maniacs can help you accomplish your goals in the immediate future.