A few weeks ago, we wrote a blog post titled First Name Personalization - The Debate Continues. We were pleasantly surprised at the traction it received (tweets, comments, blogs). Fellow Bronto Adam Covati wrote a follow up post about A|B splits and several clients tested personalization in their subsequent email campaign. Julie and I even tried a “mini-test” in our bi-weekly customer newsletter (scroll to bottom for results).
So, the $1,000,000 question: Do personalized subject lines work? Do they lead to more opens/renders, higher click-through rates, a bump in conversions? I hope you are sitting down for the answer.
Answer: It Depends!
I know that “it depends” is never a popular answer. Please continue reading for a more detailed explanation.
- Know Thy Audience: Brian Whalley, Community Manager at OurStage (a social media site for artists and fans) performed an A|B split on these two audiences. Brian found that personalized subject lines made significant positive difference with the artist segment, but not with the fans. He attributes this result to the fact that artists identify more closely with their usernames. Whereas, usernames do not seem to resonate as much with fans. Ask yourself, is personalization relevant to your audience?
- Predetermine What Metric Equals Success: What is your goal with your personalization tests? Higher open/render rates? More click-throughs? An increase in conversions? This is critical. Some tests will prove that personalization will lead to higher opens, but if there is no noticeable positive impact on conversions (and this matters to your program), then who cares?
- What Worked Today May Not Work Tomorrow: In other words, continue to test. Sometimes personalized subject lines work because they are different. Call it the “newness factor.” Your subscribers may not respond the same way if you personalize on every single email. Mix it up once in awhile.
- Double-Check Your Data: Bad data can cause incorrect (”Dear Firstname,” or “Dear Bob,” when their name is Mary) or even blank (”Dear ,”) content, potentially endangering the trust and credibility you have built with your recipients. Another Bronto client recently sent out a message with personalized subject lines that included the wrong usernames, due to an internal database error. Ironically, they saw higher open rates on this message, but certainly this wasn’t their goal. See point #2 above.
Any way you slice it, it all boils down to testing. What worked for one segment may not work for another. What worked Tuesday may not work Wednesday. Your tests may result in more click-throughs, but fewer conversions. Finally, bad data can return some unintended, yet interesting results.
A.B.T. - Always Be Testing
DJ Waldow and Julie Waite
Account Managers at Bronto
*For those interested in the customer newsletter A|B Split results, they were fairly inconclusive. There was only a few percentage points of difference in open/render and click-throughs.
Related posts:
- Tips For Better Subject Lines Better late than never - here’s Part II of our...
- Why is “testing” my favorite word? For many of us, the word “test” evokes all sorts...
- Straight Talk on Subject Lines I’m from New York, so I’m going to give it...
{ 5 trackbacks }
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
DJ,
Can you clarify item 1 “Know Thy Audience” - User names vs a Persons actual name are significantly different.
Sending me email with the personalization using Matt, vs. EmailKarma are completely different things and how I treat each of those messages would vary immensely.
Cheers,
Matt
@emailkarma
@Matt aka EmailKarma -
That is an excellent point. I think it is almost worthy of an entirely new blog post.
The general idea behind “Know Thy Audience” is to be cognizant of who you are sending to and adjust your personalization accordingly. This may mean no personalization OR personalization by first name OR personalization by username OR some other type of personalization.
Overall, the better you know and understand the open/render/click/conversion behavior of your targeted segments, the better you will be able to send relevant, timely, meaningful emails.
Hope this helps clarify (a bit).
dj
I think when you use personalization consistently it loses its appeal. I noticed this when I changed my subject lines after about 6 straight months of using personalization. After running a series of A/B test, I learned that not using first name in this case actually increased opens and clicks.
I think consumers wised up and realized it was perhaps gimmicky?
Matt V - Username personalization worked for our artists, because they identify strongly with their band’s name. Think about it like this - When Paul McCartney sees “The Beatles” in a headline, he’s very likely to check it out and see what people are saying about him and his work! The association may be even stronger than his first name, since lots of people have that name and he’s used to being spammed with messages for Paul. When he sees something with The Beatles in it though… he knows it’s something for him and him alone. Open rates on messages for artists that included their band’s name skyrocketed. Our fans don’t identify the same way - “hellokitty23″ for example doesn’t have the same ring to it :)
Brian Whalley
Community Manager
OurStage.com