Our experts came across these previously published articles we thought you would find useful.

These are re-posts from the original sources. Author: tmrdirect

Email is still one of the best ways to get in front of your audience…but people are still busy and a TON of email gets deleted.  So, as marketers, we’re always looking for easy ways to get more emails opened, seen, and ultimately clicked on!

We recently stumbled across a pretty neat strategy.  I’m going to share this strategy with you, but first I’m going to preface it with a few notes:

1. This strategy should not be used for every email you send.
2. The data in this blog post does not include large amounts of data.  It’s a very small sample, but highlights a potential tactic worth testing.  I’m not saying this will work for you, but based on my experience, I think it will.
3. Your email content still has to be GOOD STUFF!

Ok, let’s get to the good stuff!

2 Comparions

Basically, I looked at two variations of subject lines that I have tested.  One subject line was pretty standard.  It looked something like this: “Webinar Recording Available” or “How Content Marketing Drives More Sales”.  For the rest of this post, we’ll call this the “Regular” subject line.

The other variation of subject lines included a very unique twist.  We put a “re:” in front of the subject line to signal “regarding”.

Those subject lines looked something like this: “re: Marketing Case Study” or “re: Webinar Recording You Requested”.  So what happened??

The Results

The subject lines that included a “re:” in front of them outperformed the regular subject lines…by a lot!  The open rates for the “re:” subject lines were 24.7% higher!

And that’s not all…

I think these subject lines will actually give you a higher increase in open rate than that.

I took my top 3 performing emails in terms of open rate…they all included “re:” in front of them.  I then took the very next 3 emails (so these are the next best performers) and compared the two sets.  If I were to take an average open rate for my regular emails, the open rate would be much lower than the one I used since I only looked at my top 3 regular emails.

(see basic calculations and math below)

Next Steps

My recommendation would be to try this method.  Don’t use this strategy everytime, but mix it in and see if you get higher open rates.  If you have the ability to A/B test, do that.  If not, just mix up your next several emails and do the math like I did.

It doesn’t have to be complicated.  In fact, we like to keep things as simple as possible.  Try it…measure it…and move forward with the winning strategy.