| October In The News |
The Art of the Subject Line
Online copywriting guru Nick Usborne chats with exec editor Brad Berens about the dos and don'ts for writing effective email marketing subject lines. Last year, in a talk about online writing that I gave to a group of talented undergraduate writers at the University of Southern California, I argued that the most important genre of writing for them to master is the email subject line. I think a lot about subject lines: what makes them good and bad, effective and ineffective, but one thing that has long puzzled me is how little attention many companies pay to the lowly subject line. For perspective, I turned to Nick Usborne. Nick is a leading authority on the subject of writing for the web, and he wrote "Net Words," a bible for both copywriters and writers of content online. Recently, Nick joined the talented folks at MarketingExperiments.com as a senior analyst. This week, he spared some time to chat about subject lines. iMedia: Back in the day, I was the editor for all things digital at EarthLink, and in my experience the subject line was always the last thing on the agenda for whatever agency was working on whatever marketing email -- particularly when it came to HTML or rich media emails. This worried me, particularly since the subject line is often a make-or-break component. Do you have a sense of a) whether or not this is as pervasive a phenomenon as I think it is, and b) if so, why it might be? Nick Usborne: I agree. Many companies pay very little attention to the subject lines in their emails and newsletters. Evidence of this lack of attention can be found in the very basic mistakes so many companies and organizations make. Why? I can think of five reasons. 1. Lack of understanding. Many companies pay plenty of attention to the body of the message, and far too little to the quality of the message in the subject line. To illustrate this point, no offline direct mail agency would rush or hurry the writing of the text on the envelope of a direct mail promotion. Direct marketers understand that the envelope copy is crucial to the success of the whole mailing. Companies online are yet to understand that subject line copy is just as important to the success of an email or newsletter. 2. Creative pride. Writing subject lines is all too often seen as boring, uninteresting work. Such a short snippet of text may be seen as "beneath" the talents of the writers involved. Misplaced pride. 3. Lack of process. Creative and production groups are often under incredible pressure to deliver the next email or newsletter. Because writing and testing the subject line is not carved in stone as a required step in the process, it simply falls between the cracks. A line is written quickly, without enough thought as to its potential impact on open rates and conversion rates. 4. Laziness. Some writers know how important the subject line is. They also know that others in their organization may not. So they can get away with rushing the job. Pure laziness. 5. Lack of testing. The first day you test different subject lines and see the results, you'll never be complacent again. When you do the math and see how much money you are leaving on the table with the second best subject line, compared to the best...that's when you start taking subject lines seriously. iMedia: So what are the "very basic mistakes" that many companies make when it comes to subject lines? Usborne: The most basic mistakes I see are as follows: 1. Using words that cause the email to be filtered at the gateway, ISP, server or individual account holder level. Do you sell "excess inventory"? Be careful: use of the word "excess" may get you filtered. Do you want to point to a "hot" topic? The same problem exists with the word "hot" and many, many others. 2. Being too promotional. Yes, one can be too promotional. The problem is that your line could end up "sounding" like a spam headline. When spam isn't filtered by technology, it's filtered by the human brain. And the human brain filters based on both the words it sees and the tone of the message. If you are writing subject lines, then you should study spam subjects lines so that you can get a feel for what your own lines shouldn't sound like. 3. Failure to be interesting. Boring subject lines work only when you have a very, very strong relationship with your subscribers. For the rest of us, the line has to touch on something that is important to the reader. You have very few words to work with, so you need to make a careful study of which words acts as triggers for your audience. How do you know which these words are? Through research and testing. Not sure how to test for trigger words? Use Google AdWords as a research tool. Test different headings for otherwise identical ads, find the top-performing words and phrases and then try them in your subject lines. iMedia: On that basic level, how many characters do you usually dedicate to the meat of the subject line? I usually want the meat of the subject line (the product, promotion or company) to be explicit within 60 characters, but with bigger and wider screens becoming more prevalent, I wonder if I'm dating myself with that number. Usborne: Sixty characters sounds like plenty to me. If you can't get an "open" within the first fifty characters, you're probably not being careful enough with the words you choose. iMedia: Recently, we've been experimenting with our own subject lines here at iMedia Connection. We've gone from every subject line being the same (the title of the newsletter plus the date) to unique subject lines. In a few weeks we'll start A/B testing, but right now we're alternating between single-topic subject lines (in which we pick the story we think will interest the greatest number of our readers) and more inclusive, multi-topic subject lines. I haven't seen the tracking numbers yet, and so I don't know if there will a) be any particular lift or decline in open rate from a unique subject line, and b) don't know if a single topic subject line will be better than a multi-topic one. Do you have any predictions? Regardless of your willingness to play Karnac the Great, do you have a general brief about single versus multi topic? Usborne: It has been a long time since I tried predicting winners among subject lines. I used to work with a company which sent out over two million newsletters a month. Two days before the publication date we would test between five and seven subject lines, sending each to about five thousand subscribers. Whichever line won would become the line we would use for the balance of the two million. Here's what I learned. You never, ever know. Over a period of two years, other than by pure chance, I don't think I ever predicted the winning line based on my experience. As far as I am concerned, the only way to know which is the best subject line, or even the best approach, is to test a range of options every single time you create a new email or newsletter. iMedia: Earlier you said, "The first day you test different subject lines and see the results, you'll never be complacent again. When you do the math and see how much money you are leaving on the table with the second best subject line, compared to the best...that's when you start taking subject lines seriously." Can you give us a sense of scale by this? How much money? Are you talking about A/B testing or something more complicated?" Usborne: In testing subject lines I have seen one line outperform another by close to fifty percent. (In that instance, the subject lines were very, very close in both tone and the words used, which only goes to show how important testing is.) So, let's do some simple math here on an email to a modest list and a reasonable priced service. Send out an email to 100,000 people. And let's say you want them to sign up for a subscription service priced at $34.95 a year. If you get a two percent conversion rate, your revenue from that email will be $69,900. If you get a four percent conversion, as a result of a better subject line and higher open rate, you'll gross $139,800. Now let's assume that each subscriber stays with you for an average of three years. Now think about sending this email, or one like it, every month. And now think about what happens when you test five subject line options and find that one of them outperforms the others not by one percent but by fifty percent. What are you looking at after three years? You're looking at a difference in revenue that can add up to hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars. This is worth keeping in mind the next time you just scribble out your best guess at a good subject line. Nick Usborne is a Senior Analyst with MarketingExperiments.com and an editor of the Marketing Experiments Journal. The Marketing Experiments Journal is focused on just one task: to find out what really works online. A free subscription to the Journal brings you their latest research findings, twice a month. Get Testy The straight-up numbers from the online campaign don't impress: half a million e-zines sent, yielding a measly 307 click-throughs and 25 information requests. It's enough to make a hardened marketer cry. Yet a deeper analysis, conducted by MarketingExperiments.com, the online publication of marketing research company MEC Labs in Atlantic Beach, Fla., tells a far different story. Despite the abysmal click-through rate of 0.06 percent, the campaign is expected to generate at least $84,000 in 12 months — at a cost of only $1,000. That's a jaw-dropping return on investment of 8,300 percent. Can you say promotion? As these findings indicate, there are compelling reasons for companies to analyze their marketing initiatives. The New York Times and Reuters, for example, work with MEC Labs, testing such tactics as pay-per-click, search engine optimization and banner advertising. To get an insider's view on what marketing methods are truly effective on the web these days, and the future of online advertising, Fuel caught up with Jalali Hartman, senior analyst for strategy for MEC Labs. Fuel: What online marketing tactic is yielding the best results? Hartman: There are different things working for different companies, and it's a combination of all the different tactics carefully measured and carefully optimized. One of the biggest issues we see when we start looking at what a company is doing online is, typically, they're not paying close enough attention to the conversion rate on their own site — whether it's an e-mail capture, a lead form or an actual product being sold. There are usually some issues preventing customers from actually buying or taking action. Successful companies are carefully monitoring and tracking everything and trying to optimize things as much as they can. Some companies might look at their online strategies the same way they look at an offline strategy. Very rarely does a web site have the same level of marketing precision that a direct mail piece does. Because online offers are less expensive to publish than direct mail, advertisers will rarely invest the time into the copy, graphics and pricing research that they would for a print ad. Because the web is so easy to test, we are finding that smart companies are actually using the web to test and optimize offline marketing. Fuel: Is Internet advertising viable over the long haul? Hartman: Absolutely. However, more and more, consumers are skeptical and less receptive to being bombarded with offers. Very often the small, discrete text ad will pull much better than the big flash ad that takes up half the page. If advertisers think about how they can serve their customers and how they can organize their offers to their customer base, rather than just bombarding them with offers, they'll be more successful. Fuel: What's the fallout from recent click-fraud problems in the pay-per-click world? Hartman: It's one of the biggest problems facing the Internet right now. We recently did a study and found click-fraud as high as 30 percent on some major campaigns. I do think it's being addressed. There are monitoring firms you can use to detect [fraud], and Google and Overture are sort of taking steps to try to prevent it. How Is Information Passed Around the Web? › › › The Leading Edge A recent experiment by the data geeks at MarketingExperiments.com may just challenge everything you think you know about online advertising. It also might say an awful lot about how people learn about new stuff on the Web. What the data geeks did was pretty striking. First, they sent a series of press releases on different topics through various wire services. Then, they measured the traffic and links back to their site generated by the press releases. Next, they purchased a series of Google PPC (define) ads using keywords that correlated to the press releases' content. Once the ads were in the hopper, they sat back and tracked the traffic generated by those ads. What they found was startling. The press releases' ROI (define) was significantly better than the ads' ROI. In some cases, the press releases' actual CPC (define) was zero (not accounting for the time spent writing the releases), while the ads' CPC for a first-place Google position was as high as $12.25! Looking at all the data, the bottom line is generating traffic with PR was 21.4 to 56.3 percent cheaper than PPC advertising. It's possible to quibble with some of the methodology, and it may be possible to argue comparing the cost of a top Google spot with a press release isn't really fair. Moreover, not counting the cost of creating a press release in the ROI equation seems a bit skewed, though the report does assert "these costs are similar to those involved with the labor of setting up and optimizing a PPC campaign." A valid point. These findings could spark a major food fight between PR and marketing departments everywhere. But it's more important to look at them in the context of what they say about how information gets passed around the Web and how people gather news and information about new stuff. Understanding those patterns can help ensure your stuff gets noticed. One of the most important things about news (which most advertising can't match) is it gets passed around. I've written before about viral marketing in the context of actual ads that are passed around (as have plenty of other people). There's no doubt creating buzz through viral objects works when done correctly. But the thing many often forget (and the MarketingExperiments study touches on) is news is itself a virus and can be created for far less money than high production value viral ads. In the past, no one but PR professionals and journalists had access to newswires. That's changed. Anyone with an RSS (define) reader can tap into hundreds of newswire releases straight from the source. In addition, many news aggregator and industry information sites "feed" press releases directly to the public, often intermingled with news written by reporters. Bloggers, ever eager to get the next scoop on their competition, obsessively troll the wires looking for new things to write about. A story pops up that interests them and -- boom! It's blogged. Other bloggers see the new post, pick up on it, and the chain continues. If you doubt this works, track a few hot topics on BlogPulse. Perhaps it's not fair to compare PR and advertising. But both are about capturing attention. Ads capture attention by appealing to our emotions and inserting themselves into the stream of other media we consume. This attention capture is (usually) ephemeral, however, generating a response in the viewer in the immediate term and perhaps building a store of connection between a need and a brand in the long term. PR is really about creating something far more long lasting: a meme that lives far beyond immediate ad exposure. In many ways, viral marketing takes advantage of both PR's and advertising's benefits, functioning as an ad for the brand that creates it and a newsworthy object itself, outside the context of what it's advertising. Unless an ad reaches viral status, it's doomed to stay put, limiting its effectiveness in an age where media are networked and information flows freely between millions of Internet users. PR's power is allowing you to cross barriers between commercial publications and the ever-growing blogosphere (not to mention other word-of-mouth channels). It allows your brand to extend virally through ever-growing "word of mouse." There's no doubt people like sharing information and ideas with others online through blogs and other means. And there's no doubt the number of people who get their news online is growing. Tapping into these trends can be a powerful, and arguably cheaper and better, alternative to traditional ad techniques. MarketingExperiments' experiment may not be the definitive word on whether PR's better than advertising, but next time you need to get more bang for your buck in an online campaign, you certainly have something to think about. Sean Carton is Chief Experience Officer at Carton Donofrio Partners, Inc. Details of the research are online in the Marketing Experiments Journal at SEM Testing & Optimization — MarketingExperiments.com This site is literally an online laboratory devoted to testing every conceivable marketing method on the Internet. Experiments range from three to eighteen months, and they involve budgets ranging from $4500 to $100,000+(US). The complete testing program, including all methods, copy used and findings, is served up to subscribers at the site and in the form of email newsletters. There is a plethora of no-cost information to discover here under the topics of Online Advertising, PPC/Organic Search and Site Conversion (other topics include Email Marketing and Marketplaces). Reports at the time of writing covered improving PPC ad copy clickthrough, testing trial offers, the usefulness of smaller PPC search engines, a 46-point blueprint that increased Google AdWords ROI by 1200% and much more. Unbelievably, all this information is of no cost to visitors and subscribers. The company makes its money by testing and optimizing campaigns for paying clients. To subscribe to The Marketing Experiments Journal for free, click here. About MarketingExperiments.com MarketingExperiments.com Media Contacts: David Politis Maura Lansford |
