URGENT: USE THIS SIMPLE TRICK TO DRASTICALLY IMPROVE YOUR EMAIL OPENING RATES [gmethod]

Many people decide whether to open an email or not, based on the subject line. An inefficient subject line would lead to low opening rates.

MailChimp did some research on this, and discovered that:

Words like "urgent" and "important" resulted in open rates that were much higher than normal.

They found that these words, at the beginning of the subject line, led to higher opening rates:
Urgent
Breaking
Important
Alert

This is also backed up by the research paper Influence tactics in virtual teams published in the Computers in Human Behavior journal, which states that the word Urgent "provides a quick jolt of pressure to get a target to realize the importance of a particular task"

MailChimp also found that capitalization helps:
While performing the analyses above, we looked at the impact of capitalization on open rates. The results were quite surprising. First of all, the use of an entirely capitalized subject line resulted in slightly higher open rates than usual for a given user/list.

Surprisingly, they found that capitalizing only one word had a negative impact on opening rates!

Probably not too new or surprising to anyone, but nice to see that there is a statistically significant difference made by these simple tweaks. I have not tried these out before, since I instinctively felt that it would look spammy (personally, I feel this thread title looks like spammy clickbait. What was your first reaction when you saw it?). I never did any testing myself though, and since MailChimp discovered the above based on 24 billion (!) emails, I think it is worth a try.

You obviously shouldn't overdo it, as your email list would feel annoyed by getting "urgent" emails every other day. But if you frame the content correctly, it could be helpful when sending out last chance/limited time offers.

Will you try out any of these subject line word tweaks with your list?

For me, whenever i see something written urgent or important in the title, i automatically know its a spam

Same goes here, when I se Urgent or Alert I know it's spam!

We are just about to begin an email marketing campaign for a new online business, so I may try some of those words in the split testing for the larger, secondary email list. First list is 30K and already planned, but the second list is 150K and we can afford to more experimental with it.

I agree with you on their finding about block capitals. That feels counter-intuitive as it seems innately spammy to me as well - to the point I would be unsure about even trying it.

If this is true, then MailChimp just proved how many morons there are on the internet.

Why would anyone open an email with an all caps title, labelled "Urgent" from someone they don't know? Thanks for the info though OP. Useful knowledge in any case.

adarshbio4 said:

For me, whenever i see something written urgent or important in the title, i automatically know its a spam

Click to expand...

RuthSam said:

Same goes here, when I se Urgent or Alert I know it's spam!

Click to expand...

But, I guess we see these as from IM'ers point of view. It could be different for general public.

I lately got emails starting with Re: that made me open the emails. I thought I already wrote an email to that person and he replied. Not falling for it again lol.

SHOCKING: Anyone that's been doing IM for more than 2 years already knows this!

General public do open these emails. My father dont know anything about IM But i have see my father checking these kinds of emails too. I told my father many times these emails are just spam.

Solid Tip. Thanks added. It's about aggregating as much knowledge as you can and then applying it. Another one that works well is Follow Up