Wise Marketer Staff
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from The Wise Marketer, a website and newsletter serving the global loyalty industry.
Consumers open e-mails with personalized subject lines at a 50 percent higher rate than those without, yet only two percent of e-mails employ personalization, according to findings from Yes Lifecycle Marketing.
In the newly released report, “Subject Line Benchmarks: How Length and Personalization Impact Email Performance across Message Type and Industry,” more than seven billion e-mails were analyzed. According to the findings, personalized e-mails — like those including a recipient’s name or purchased/browsed items — drove higher open and click rates than their non-personalized counterparts. In fact, messages with personalized subject lines generated more than double the unique click rate and 58 percent higher click-to-open (CTO) rate than those without. However, nearly 98 percent of all e-mails sent in Q2 2017 did not use personalization in subject lines.
According to the report, 1.1 percent of all e-mails sent in Q2 2017 had first/last name personalization in their subject lines while 1.2 percent were personalized based on other factors, such as loyalty program status, browse behavior or purchase history. High e-mail engagement came from subject lines incorporated items from consumers’ abandoned carts or inserted loyalty program attributes like expiration dates, status achieved or number of points remaining until the next membership milestone.
Additional findings from the report include:
- Non-personalized subject lines yielded open rates of just 14.1 percent compared to 21.2 percent for those personalized with name and 22.0 percent for those including another type of personalization.
- Welcome campaigns were the most widely adopted type of trigger with 69 percent of marketers implementing them.
- Over a quarter (27 percent) of marketers sent reactivation campaigns, the second most widely adopted type of trigger. For triggered messages such as abandoned cart, birthday and reviews/surveys, including a specific offer in the subject line drove better open rates and higher conversion rates.