The 14 Best Words That Get People to Open Email
By Amanda MacArthur • 06/26/2012
Last week I watched The Science of Email Marketing hosted by an analytics nerd I admire, Dan Zarella.
In the webinar, he said bluntly, “I would rather have an email subscriber than a Twitter follower.” We’d like to think it’s because email subscribers respond better to promotions, but according to Dan’s presentation, email and Twitter are almost equal in terms of lead generation. Still, our Twitter followers are often fair weather friends, aren’t they?
Dan reminded businesses that since 88% of people use their work email as their main email address, so your email subject lines can’t be boring. ”You’re competing with baby pictures and invitations to dinner”, he said.
Boring, jargon-y words like evaluation, soon, administration, liked, please, minutes and enjoyed were the most common in top unopened emails.
Dan pulled Hubspot’s data from over 500,000 emails sent, and the top seven words with the best open rates tended to indicate a benefit to the user:
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secret
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e-sales
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awesome
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skills
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ebook
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helpful
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shipping
Dan commented on these results, saying to “phrase it in a way for what I as the reader wants”.
Still, you can’t listen to what just one test says, in fact you should really be looking at your own data for this information. Mailchimp, however, also had its own set of popular words coming from an even bigger dataset of over 9.5 billion emails. Here were the top seven:
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posts
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jobs
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survey
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week’s
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e-newsletter
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issue
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digest
Like Hubspot’s data, these words show that telling users what’s in the email is a good thing. It also tells you that digests, or week-in-review type email seems to be working really well too.
Now that you know the best words, ready to learn The 17 Best Email Subject Lines to embed them in?
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Posted in Email Marketing Management
June 26th, 2012 at 7:36 pm
Very interesting. Thanks very much – I’m always trying to work out which words to use in subject lines. Interesting that “e-newsletter” was popular, I would have thought that was boring. I guess it’s to the point and tells people what they’re in for in the email. Thanks again
June 26th, 2012 at 9:55 pm
Very useful information Thank you.This can help me improve my email marketing results
Thanks again
June 28th, 2012 at 8:11 pm
Glad you found it useful Kirill. Jennifer, when we tested at Mequoda a while back we also found that identifying ourselves at the beginning of every subject line (Mequoda Daily: ….. ) increased open rates too. We thought it’d be redundant, but as it turns out people respond to consistency!
June 29th, 2012 at 9:22 am
Some good insight and words that you would not think are in the top 14, were these tests carried out Globally or to a US database?
June 29th, 2012 at 9:33 am
Very surprising results – I guess it just shows the value of testing and using large samples.
As Jennifer, above, says – I think that several of the “buzz” words are boring.
I think I’d like to read more of this study!
Another surprise – subscribers using their work email as their main email.
I wonder how reliable this data is when you consider that the “From” field is so crucial?
When I see an email from someone I trust or like then I just open it without a glance at the subject line.
Lots of food for thought here!
November 10th, 2012 at 5:02 pm
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January 29th, 2013 at 9:33 am
thanks for that info and would you set some of full paragraph to put it in emails , Thanks again
March 16th, 2013 at 12:35 pm
Really when someone doesn’t understand then its up to other viewers that they will help, so here it takes place.