We’re All Here To Learn

Inbox Ideas | Email Marketing Tips by AWeber

Posted by Justin Premick

When I was in school, particularly in the earlier years of my education, I was a “good” student.

I regarded the teacher as the highest authority on whatever the topic of discussion was. I would question, but I tended to conclude that if the instructor must know what they were talking about… that was why you taught, right? Because you knew.

I’ve long since found out that we learn best by challenging our teachers, something that’s served me well in educational roles here at AWeber and elsewhere. One of our blog readers reminded me of that recently.

A while back, Marc posted about how to effectively use subject lines.

In a comment, Deane pointed out that the subject lines on our own blog updates could use some work:

“I find using [AWeber Blog] in the subject line to be repetative. In the Microsoft Outlook preview pane I’m already seeing the email address Aweber Blog (I agree- a must).”

A lot of you come here from the email updates we send, so an opportunity to make those more effective got my attention right away.

I use several test addresses to check our messages before sending, but I’d really only been paying attention to the message body. Most of the time I barely noticed the subject because I was clicking on the message so fast.

Well, this time I stopped and looked at the messages and how they looked in my inbox. Here’s what I saw:

Blog Update Sender and Subject in Yahoo!

So the sender is AWeber Blog, and the subject starts [AWeber Blog]. Might as well have tagged the email as “Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.”

So One of Them Has To Go. But Which One?

It’s tempting to keep the [AWeber Blog] in the subject line — if someone’s email client doesn’t display the sender’s name, but only their address, we’ll have the sender as help@aweber.com, which doesn’t indicate that it’s a blog update.

However, the majority of email clients do display a name. And for them, it makes more sense to keep the sender as AWeber Blog and to change the subjects. That way, the sender is still clear, and we can use that space in the subject line to communicate something else — or just shorten our subjects entirely, making them easier to read.

So the [AWeber Blog] part of the subject is going away.

But What Do We Replace It With?

As I saw it, we had two options:

Replace the text in between the [ ] with something else; or
Don’t replace it with anything — just start with the post title

I didn’t want to make a significant change to the format of the messages. I wanted our subscribers — you — to still recognize the messages easily, and I felt that the brackets helped to get your attention.

So I wanted to keep the brackets. But I wasn’t going to do it unless I could make good use of them.

Here’s What I Came Up With

I considered that we publish information on the blog about a variety of topics:

Email Marketing
Deliverability
Email Design
Case Studies
Webinars

I’m pretty sure that while a lot of you like hearing what we have to say about all of these, you all probably have one or two areas that interest you more than the others.

Your time is valuable. Why not show you in the subject which area we’re talking about today?

From now on, your email updates will start with the category that we’re posting in. For example:

Was This a Good Idea?

Like any other decision, this one has potentially negative consequences.

Well, one notable one, really — if you get an email update about a topic you’re not especially interested in, you may be less likely to open that email, and so we may see reduced opens and clickthroughs as a result of this change.

However, I think it’s a good change for two reasons:

I think that it increases the value of the blog updates to you by helping you to decide faster if you want to read them.
You’re smart and mature enough to decide if you want to stop reading posts in a particular category — if you’re willing to run the risk of missing out on the advice we offer, I’m willing to run the risk of you not opening a blog update.

What Do You Think: 2 Questions

I’m curious — For those of you on our blog updates list, do you like this change?

And for everyone — This is an example of how I approached a real-world email campaign decision (in this case, a design one). Is this sort of post something you’d like to see more of?

Also… thanks Deane for getting me to look at our own email campaign — and for inspiring this post!

Print This Post

17 Responses

Graham Cox
March 15th, 2007 at 8:59 am

The only thing I’d say about keeping the brackets is it decreases the chance of someone seeing your whole subject line copy, which may potentially hurt your open rate.

I like this type of content for your blog posts though. I’d also like to see more real-world success cases from customers. What’s really working for people etc.

Cheers.

Graham
Mikael Rieck
March 15th, 2007 at 9:23 am

Personally I don’t like brackets but that is mostly from a "nice view" point. I agree with Deane that having Aweber Blog twice is to much and I think that keeping the sender name was the right way to go.

Thanks for some valuable blog posts.
Justin Premick
March 15th, 2007 at 9:27 am

Graham,

I thought about that, and that was actually the most compelling argument I could come up with for ditching the brackets entirely.

That said, a quick look at our past blog posts revealed that we’ve only used a post title longer than 50 characters twice. Since we like the post titles to fit on one line in the blog, it’s not likely that we’ll surpass that 50-character mark often in the future, if at all.

Using the brackets and category adds 10-20 characters to our subject line length. With our previous posts, at worst that gives us a subject line of about 70 characters, which is on the long side, but will still show up in most major email clients.

Bottom line: we’ll have to keep our post titles short, which is in our best interest anyway.
Graham Cox
March 15th, 2007 at 10:49 am

Justin,

Thanks for explaining the reasoning behind your decision. As you say, if you’re subject lines are short anyway then it really shouldn’t be a problem.

Cheers…
Samantha
March 15th, 2007 at 11:25 am

Justin,

I really appreciate the way you’ve shared the thought process on this. It helped me to read the If-Then scenarios as you worked through the options.

I agree that saving readers time with a more specific topic category is a good idea. The brackets work for me, but I like reading dissenting opinions on this and would love to see follow-up research to learn what people think based on their subscribers’ behavior.

I know that subject lines affect whether I open email in some of my email programs. However, in my main email program, Eudora, I rely so much on the preview pane that I don’t look at subject line at all; just Sender Name and whatever shows up in the preview.

Thanks for adding so much value to my AWeber account with this blog.
Ron Passfield
March 15th, 2007 at 2:18 pm

Justin

Being new to Aweber (but not autoresponders) I too appreciate the fact that you have shared your reasoning for the change.

I would have prefered the omission of the [ ] altogether. Given that you cover such a limited range of "categories", I think that entering the category in the [ ] is unnecessary and in fact will still introduce redundancy.

The cost is the potential cutting off of the subject line - something that annoys me.

I would rather see the full subject title than the [category] plus some truncation of the subject - but that’s my view.

Thanks for sharing your insights and case studies.
Gidon Ariel
March 16th, 2007 at 3:30 am

In our newsletter, the format is:

<Unique Issue Title>:<Catchy fixed newsletter title>

For example:
The Long And The Short Of It: Thoughts and Prayers from Jerusalem

This way, the catchy issue title hooks them, and the text identifying this email as the newsletter they expect might be cut off, but no matter.

So I would suggest:

Where Should You Publish Your Forms?: Aweber Solutions

Thanks and God Bless
Justin Premick
March 16th, 2007 at 9:30 am

Hi Gidon,

My goal in changing the subjects was to get away from having the fixed text [AWeber Blog] in the subject.

As Deane pointed out to me, there wasn’t any point to having that fixed text there for us, because we were already branded in our From line.

The commenters thus far appear to favor not having the bracketed section there at all. And your reasoning is sound.

However, as I noted in my reply to Graham’s comment I think the risk being brought up - that the subject lines might get cut off - is one that can be controlled through simply not having long post titles, which is something that we should strive for anyway.

Thanks to everyone for dropping in with your thoughts and experiences with subject line formatting.

Obviously it’s too early to tell what the results we’ll be getting from this change are, but if I’m able to draw any conclusions from it in the future, I’ll be sure to blog them.
Brad Isaac
March 16th, 2007 at 11:55 am

I have used the brackets with a standard identifier for a couple of years too. They were getting old, from my perspective, it’s good to see you are testing it. I look forward to seeing how well the new system works.
Peter Koning
March 16th, 2007 at 12:07 pm

Justin - in your last post (just above this one) you talked about results.

While sharing your thought process and trying to discuss if it’s a good idea or not is interesting, it doesn’t really help us know best practices since you still need to test.

I’d like to see results and not just people’s opinions.

I suggest you test the two major variations and then show which one is judged better - by the readers and open/click through rates. Sharing the testing process would help us all with this type of issue.

Cheers,
Peter
Brad Isaac
March 16th, 2007 at 6:20 pm

Peter, I would guess since aweber can do split test mailings that’s what they are doing.
Jason Cresswell
March 17th, 2007 at 9:04 am

Justin,

In regards to your question about the style of post, I would say that it is valuable. Aweber is obviously a successful company, and I for one appreciate any glimpse into what really goes in to making that happen. So, yes, I would encourage you to continue to use real-world examples and how they apply to all of us.

As for the "what’s in the bracket" issue, I would say that if your goal is to get your e-mails open and read, it doesn’t matter as much. As you’ve already noted, the majority of e-mail clients will have the name Aweber Blog show up as the sender. You are in the enviable position of having good name recognition and trust. Thus, the only real way to get people to open your email is to offer them an enticing subject line that speaks to their needs. Whatever is in the bracket will also be redundant and extra reading if your subject line has been properly written.

Jason
Maryann
March 20th, 2007 at 8:06 am

Hi, Justin,

I really like the idea of placing the blog’s topic in brackets. Of course, I don’t think it will affect which blog entries I read; they’re all great! But it will help me to categorize them when I save them in my AWeber Blog folder on Outlook. In this way, if I need a refresher on a particular topic, I can go directly to the related folder.

Keep up the great work!

Regards,

Maryann Diorio
TopNotch Life & Career Coaching
Mark Berry
March 20th, 2007 at 4:13 pm

Heck ya, I want to see more real-life examples like that. Aweber is a highly successful company, much more successful than most. And since marketing is everyone’s bread and butter, I want to see all the real-world marketing decisions that Aweber is willing to show us! Love the blog!

As for the new subject lines, I was using rules for everything. So the new system would hinder and annoy my old system of filters and rules. I’d always recommend an abbreviation in the brackets. It makes for a quick rule or filter, and your readers will recognize it quickly, probably [ab] would be my recommendation.

My new system is an entirely separate web-mail email address that’s just for all my newsletters. That way, my friends with newsletter always think I’m reading their stuff, and I don’t miss events if I check it once a week. Under my new system, your new subject lines are fine… maybe one tip is to shorten them so I can see more of the subject line itself.
Will Kenny
March 20th, 2007 at 5:06 pm

There seems to be a trade off between providing the convenience of a category or general topic area in brackets, and cutting off the subject line.

I’d suggest you put the brackets at the END of the subject line.

If the recipient’s e-mail view shows the entire subject line, you’ve still provided convenient information about the type of information in the post.

If the e-mail view tends to truncate the line, then you probably want it to cut off the brackets, not the other part of the subject.

Will Kenny
Best Training Practices
Martha
March 23rd, 2007 at 10:35 am

How about using the person’s name? Example:

Justin - Where Should You Publish Your Forms?

I think that doing this accomplishes two things

1) It gets the readers attention and they are more likely to open an email with their name in the subject line.

2) It helps keep the email out of the bulk email folder since it has their name in the title.

I started doing this over a year ago and it really helped my open rate.

Just my 2 cents

Martha
Angela
March 28th, 2007 at 10:39 pm

I think you made a good choice. I’ve found the same thing - people only want what they want, and don’t want to waste time even opening something they don’t. Only problem with putting the category first is the most times the subject line won’t hold all that info without getting truncated, ending up looking like {Email Marketing] Where Sh….

To avoid that, I just give it to them straight - use a compeling title I think involves the subject and also makes them want to open the email - like, Are Your Emails Getting Through? or something like that -

Using the person’s name is nice, but again if yr subject is long, it gets cut off.

The most valuable thing I have found it to have a highly targeted list who avidly wants everything I have - then no matter what I enter in the subject line, they see it’s from me and just open it.

Having highly targeted lists is great, and if there is one or more list who is interested, I mail to them all.

I think Aweber is so well-known now and respected that you could probably put sheer foolery in the s-line and it would still get opened!