Your Subject Line Might Be Crap

Is your email subject line worthless?

Maybe.

When was the last time you actually opened an email BECAUSE a subject line caught your attention?

For me… the answer is: a long time ago.

If you’re like me, you get dozens (maybe hundreds) of marketing emails a day, but only a fraction of those get opened.

When scanning my inbox, I rarely read subject lines.

I DO read sender info.

I’ll open an email from a brand I trust over regular marketing emails. On top of that, I’ll open an email from a real live person even more often, even if it’s still a marketing email.

In 2016, Litmus published result from a survey where they asked respondents what had more bearing on them opening an email. 42% said the sender info carried more weight than the subject line or the preview text.

We seem to have been running into this issue at Mirantis lately.

Our open rates are consistently falling from above 20% on average to near 10%.

The solution? I’m going to start testing emails from “{Sender’s First Name} at Mirantis” instead of just “Mirantis.”

If that doesn’t work, the next step will be testing just the sender’s name.

We’ve already seen much higher than average open rates using the “name only” strategy in some of our nurture programs, nearing 30% in some instances.

I’ll report back in some time to let you all know if this strategy moves the needle.

Hopefully raising our open rates will increase the pool of potential clicks, and more importantly… conversions.