Counting E-mails Not Calories This Holiday Season

Here is a summary of what they found:

• We should stop questioning this one — personalization works. Including the first and last names in the campaign subjects and bodies increases open rates. In fact, using it in the subject has the largest positive impact on open rates. And as you can imagine, full name is better than just the last name or just the first name. However, it does vary by industry. The article breaks it down so you can see where it matters the most and the one industry (legal) where having the personalization in the subject line is actually a negative.
• "Free" might cost you. When they looked across all the industries, it did not help. But for some industries it really did have a statistically significant increase. However, the word "freebie" blows "free" out of the water.
• The indication of "urgency" in the subject line is really a mixed bag. Words like "urgent" and "breaking" resulted in open rates that were much higher than normal. "Important" and "alert" were not as high but still had positive impact.
• Variations of the word "announce" (i.e., announcement, announcing, announced, etc.) show positive impact on open rates. However, "reminder" and "cancelled" had negative impact. But you have to pay close attention to the details of the study: Readers were more OK with "reminders" (plural and less personal) than with "reminder" (more personal). The word "cancelled" had significant impact on open rates for every single industry except for one, Restaurant & Venue.
• Big bummer for nonprofits — or perhaps let's just say it is an important insight for us — throughout the analysis, words related to charitable actions and donations had a negative impact on open rates. "Donate" had the worst impact, but other words like "helping" had lesser negative impact. Take a look at the words they looked at including "raffle" and "charity," etc.
• The use of word pairs (i.e., "thank you," "last chance," "sign up," etc.) is an interesting find. As you'll see, current events and being thanked are viewed as positive, but being told they're missing out on something — not so positive.

Take some time and glance at this study to see where your industry falls on specific elements. Luckily we've got an industry player like MailChimp willing to really take the time and provide some of this data to help all of us.