Email marketers are always looking for new ways to get people to open their emails. An improvement of even a fraction of a percent can sometimes bring a huge boost to the total profitability of a campaign. When it comes to boosting open rates, nothing has a bigger effect than tweaking the subject line. This is, of course, the one thing people see that allows them to determine whether or not they will click to see what’s inside. Marketing analytics firm Retention Science has analyzed 260 million emails over 540 marketing campaigns to help find out what works best.
One of the most significant finds was the number of words in the subject line seems to have a direct impact on the open rate. If a subject line was 6-10 words long, it was opened, on average, 21% of the time. More or fewer words in the subject line caused the open rate to drop quite significantly.
This 6-10 word length seems to be the perfect amount to allow marketers to get their point across, build anticipation and hold the readers interest. If it is shorter, the reader won’t have enough information to decide to open it. Too long and they won’t likely read it all, or it won’t all be displayed on their mobile device, so they’ll just delete the message.
The full breakdown of the open rate based on word count is as follows:
- 0-5 words – 16% open rate
- 6-10 words – 21% open rate
- 11-15 words – 14% open rate
- 16-20 words – 12% open rate
- 21-25 words – 9% open rate
Of the marketing emails they analyzed, 52% of them were sent with subject lines of 11-15 words in length. When factoring in the rest of the categories, it is likely that the 6-10 word subject line only occurs in a fairly small percentage of total emails. This is clearly an area where most marketers have a lot of improving to do. Fortunately, this is also an area that is fairly simple to fix. With a little thought when preparing the email campaign, marketers could see dramatic overall open rates.
