Thank You MailChimp
As this study from email firm MailChimp indicates, a single word in the subject line can make a big difference in open rates.
To reach its conclusions, in Choose Your Words Wisely MailChimp studied about 24 billion delivered emails, looking at subject lines composed in the aggregate of approximately 22,000 distinct words.
Some findings …
- Personalization works — especially using both first and last names.
- ‘Free’ isn’t guaranteed to work, but interestingly, ‘Freebie’ strongly lifts open rates (Go figure!).
- Words that imply time sensitivity are effective (in descending order of impact) — ‘Urgent’, ‘Breaking’, ‘Important’, ‘Alert’.
- ‘Announcements’ and ‘Invitations’ are good; ‘Reminders’ and ‘Cancellations’ are bad.
- ‘Last chance’ is a big loser — keep that in mind as your year-end fire sales approach.
And especially for fundraisers, MailChimp says:
“Throughout the analysis, words related to charitable actions and donations had a negative impact on open rates. Although all these words negatively impact open rates, choosing the right ones can mitigate the detrimental effect of donation requests. Of all the related words we studied, “donation” had the most negative impact. “Helping” had the best impact, though it can obviously be used in more contexts.”
On the other hand, one of the strongest terms you can use in a subject line …
‘Thank you”!
Thank you MailChimp.
Tom
3 responses to “Thank You MailChimp”
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Great post. And it’s perfect at this time of year that the big winner is “thank you.” Thank YOU!
Brilliant! Thanks for that!
Good info. Thanks for sharing. We actually find that the words “Thank You” slightly reduce open rates except in donation confirmation auto-responders.
We’ve been testing subject lines that speak to the donor’s impact in lieu of “thank you.”