Creative Email That Works

New research indicates including the company name and/or brand in the subject line of email campaigns could boost click-through rates by as much as 50%. Other simple changes to creative elements could boost click-through and conversion rates even more.

by Kristina Knight

The “Email Creative That Works” study by Silverpop analyzed more than 600 emails sent by 430 companies between mid-April and mid-August 2006. The most interesting finding is that branded subject lines were key to increasing the open rates of B-to-C emails. Branding the subject lines increased the open rate to 29%, without the branded subject open rates were 22%. This finding was even larger in B-to-B email campaigns. The open rate jumped to 32%, compared to 20% without the company branded subject line. These percentages could be even better however, if more email marketers employed branded subject lines. Only about 55% of B-to-B emails and 46% of B-to-C mailings utilized branding or company names in the subject line.

Along with developing a campaign lifecycle, another change to make is in the layout of messages. For B-to-B emailers the postcard style works best (7.9% click rate), but in B-to-C mailings a newsletter or one-column style worked best with 7.1% click rate. Why the difference in layouts for different campaigns?

“Perhaps postcard-style emails received higher click rates on average for BtoB marketers because of their novelty among business recipients,” said Bill Nussey, Silverpop CEO in a statement. “Clearly it’s important to try new approaches and keep the look of your emails fresh to invite continued readership.”