Counting E-mails Not Calories This Holiday Season

Starting the day before Thanksgiving (Nov. 27), I received 423 e-mails asking me to, among other things, buy, give, not to miss out on, urgently read, save XX percent (all the numbers you can imagine) and to HURRY! I stopped counting at 10 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 1. That's right — five days, 423 e-mails (and that doesn't include all that filled up my inbox on Cyber Monday).

Honestly, even as a marketer and fundraiser (translation: I should understand this digital-marketing dynamic), I was shocked at the number of promotional e-mails from both for-profit and nonprofit companies. In addition to the fact that I'm a Gmail user and all of these went into specific tabs in the new layout, trying to figure out what to keep and not keep became quickly overwhelming. So, like everyone else I talked with in an unscientific, unvalidated, do-it-yourself focus group, I just started skimming the subject lines. If this quantity in five days sheds any light on what we can expect for the rest of December, those subject lines feel even more critical than before.

I was reminded of this fantastic article from MailChimp, "Subject Line Data: Choose Your Words Wisely," which includes study data about subject lines. It does a great job of not just reporting out what some of us already know, but it really breaks down the data by industry, and what works (and what doesn't), as well as providing the percent of negative affect (and positive) when comparing certain words to other words. I urge you to read the entire article and really think through the data it provides. This is based on looking at 24 billion delivered e-mails with subject lines composed of approximately 22,000 distinct words. The authors had a very specific methodology and criteria to ensure this analysis would pass all the sniff tests and the scientific questions.