I thought I’d quickly pass along a USA Today Snapshot featured data from none other than yours truly, Experian Marketing Services. Their chart lists the top 10 most popular subject-line keywords as pulled from our study, The 2010 digital marketer: Benchmark and trend report.

• Are there any keywords that surprise you?
• Are there any that you think should be on the list that are not there?
• What about ones that you don’t think are as popular?

Share your thoughts with us!

Today, Experian Marketing Services is proud to release our latest report, the 2010 Digital marketer: Benchmark and trend report. Looking at the data contained within the report, there is certainly a lot of information for email marketers to chew on.

For the loyal readers of Email Responsibly, I thought I’d add some of my thoughts on the report and explain what these data points mean for the email industry at-large and the state of email marketing.

Let’s jump right in and have a look at what the report tells us:

Time Magazine was right
Way back in December 2006, a number of people (myself included) had a good laugh at the expense of Time Magazine, who named “You” as Person of the Year. At the time, the decision seemed like something of a cop-out and also bit out-of-touch with technology.

But looking at the data from our 2010 Digital marketer: Benchmark and trend report, I couldn’t help but think about Time Magazine and say to myself that they were right — maybe prematurely, but still correct nonetheless. Email marketing today, much like the rest of the Internet, is about you, sometimes even literally. Consider these points from our report:

• Four out of five industries (business products and services, consumer products and services, multichannel retail, travel and entertainment) used the word “you/your” more than any other word in their email subject lines. The fifth industry (catalogers) actually uses the terms “you/your” more than the other four industries (24% of the time), but they also happen to use the terms “free” and “ship” slightly more than that.
• The words “you/your” appear in 19.94% of all email marketing subject lines.
• According to the report, “The increase in usage of the term ‘you/your’ illustrates increased emphasis on businesses building more personal relationships with customers by addressing them directly.”
• According to the report, ”The top term — ‘you/your’ — indicates a clear connection between consumer product and service businesses and their individual customers. The percentages of any ‘top’ word are lower given the wide mix of businesses and product types in this vertical.”

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There has been a discussion amongst us email nerds about what is correct in a subject line: “President’s Day” or “Presidents’ Day” or “Presidents Day.” I thought “Presidents’ Day” was correct since this day honors multiple Presidents. Others argued that “President’s Day” is correct since this day honors Washington only. To put this argument to rest, I did some inbox diving for President’s Day, Presidents’ Day and other variations in subject lines.

Here are the results listing the sender and the subject line. What do you think about these? Please share your thoughts!

Results:

• 34 subject lines were analyzed.
• 20 used Presidents’ (59%)
• 10 used President’s (29%)
• 4 used another variation (12%)
• 2 used both another variation and President’s in different emails (6%)

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Subject line testing is not a new concept to email marketing or to this blog.  However, it is an important key to email marketing success. Subject line testing is easy to do and offers concrete results, but is often neglected.

Below is a typical inbox. Which subject lines best grab your attention? Which approach would work for your brand? Which one do you think is the worst performing? There’s only way to know – test it out!

Keep in mind:

• Best-in-breed email programs consistently test their subject lines.
• It is important to verify your past findings and current theories about subject lines instead of making assumptions.
• If you can increase your open rates even slightly by optimizing your subject lines, the potential to increase click and transaction rates increases.

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