Optimize your email marketing with these 14 research-backed split tests:
- Name vs. No Name. Personalization leads to an average open rate increase of 29.3%.
- First Person vs. Second Person. Emails that had “you” in the subject line were opened 5% less than without it.
- Urgency vs. No Urgency. Subject lines with a sense of urgency had 22% higher open rates.
- Long vs. Short Subject Lines. The sweet spot is right around 6-10 words in most cases.
- Ambiguous Benefit vs. Specific Benefit. You may not always have a good gauge on what is most appealing to your audience.
- Content Type Specified vs. No Content Type Specified. Teasing value gives readers an incentive to open.
- Free vs. Synonyms. The word “free” can have a positive or negative effect based on your industry.
- Emojis vs. No Emojis. Emails that contained an emoji had 56% higher email open rates.
- Sentence Case vs. Title Case. There’s no clear consensus on this one.
- Capitalization vs. No Capitalization. Having the entire subject line capitalized can produce a small, but significant increase in open rate.
- Exclamation/Question Marks vs. None. Question marks actually deceased open rates by 8.1% on average.
- Hypens vs. Colons. Using a hyphen in place of a colon in the exact same subject line resulted in open rates improving by 3%.
- Ambiguous vs. Clear Copy. Clear emails performed better by 541%.
- Gratitude vs. No Gratitude. “Thank you” increased open rates.
Check out the research at Drip.
