I have a confession to make – I’m not always great about split testing. If something is working well enough, I tend not to mess with it so often times I only do testing when something isn’t working.
So today’s email is going to be an example of two emails we sent out a few months ago. One of them bombed… big time! And the other worked a lot better… 24x better actually.
Want to know what we changed in the email to get that response? The subject line!
Other than that, the emails were identical.
The weird thing is the original subject line was one I used successfully for years as a template in the car business – it worked – I knew it worked – I had proof that it worked.
But it didn’t work this time!
I do know that a lot of the messages ended up in the spam folder so perhaps the subject line has been overused by spammers and we’ve all been trained to ignore it by now.
So what was this subject line that failed so spectacularly in 2018: “Quick Question”
Yep – it bombed – hardly anyone responded. (I tested this to a few thousand subscribers back in February)
So we tried again the next day with a different subject line: “Help”
And with that one single change we had 24 times more people respond. Same content in the email but it actually made it to peoples’ inboxes and they responded.
So if your last promotion didn’t hit the mark, maybe it wasn’t all bad… maybe it was just the subject line.
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