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The Importance of Subject Line Testing
While these strategies are a great start, each company, industry, and list is unique. Once you’ve developed one or two strong subject lines using our best practice guidelines, test your headlines for even greater response. When you increase clicks even one percent, depending on your list size, you can add substantial revenue to your bottom line.
A/B subject line split testing is one of the smartest and easiest techniques marketers can use to accelerate response. Because email marketing is instantaneous, unlike traditional postal mail, you gain the added advantage of receiving statistically valid results within just a few hours.
To split test your campaign, extract 20 percent of your list as a test group. Then split this sub-group into two: Group A and Group B. Send a test campaign using two unique subject lines to each group. Then, within just three hours, you should have enough data compiled to analyze results and determine which headline reaped the greatest response. While this practice works best with large lists of more than 1,000 recipients, you should still acquire worthwhile feedback with smaller lists.
When marketers test and tune their email subject lines, they improve response 41.4 percent on average. Listrak provides powerful, real-time analytic reports and data mining tools to make testing easy and automated. Reports are immediately available, so you can change your subject line, body content, layout or design on the fly. Listrak members also see exactly who opened and read their promotion - and which links they clicked within the body copy. The extra time you devote to testing and fine-tuning can help you increase reader satisfaction and loyalty.
Conclusion
Email marketing subject lines are arguably the most important part of your entire campaign. Why? If your email was not opened or read, your efforts were wasted, your message was not heard, and your products were not sold. Recipients filter their inboxes faster than ever before, deciding whether to delete or read an email just a half second after reading the subject line. But Listrak has identified key criteria that can help you move email marketing message to the next level. Once you’ve developed creative subject lines based on our best practice guidelines, A/B testing can improve your response by 41.4 percent on average. To make this testing process as fast and easy as possible Listrak offers its subscribers comprehensive analytic reports showing which emails were opened, who opened them and which internal links they clicked.
