Don’t Call Them by Name; It Bores Them
Should you put e-mail recipients’ names in subject lines? Not anymore, say experts. Not too long ago, leading a subject line with the recipient’s name would reportedly boost response rates.
No longer, apparently, as the novelty of seeing one’s name in an e-mail subject has been beaten, if not to death, at least to lying on the ground, quietly wheezing.
“A year or two ago, everyone was putting things like ‘Jay, buy this great sweater,’ in their subject lines,” said Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president of list firm Worldata. “Then everyone started putting names in their subject lines including spammers and pornographers. Now, so many e-mails are coming with names in their subject lines, that consumers aren’t opening them because they know it’s spam. So in some ways, personalization has become a negative in the subject line.”
However, according to Elaine O’Gorman, chief strategy officer of e-mail service provider Silverpop, e-mail personalization can still work if it has a purpose.
“Subject line personalization works if you’re actually using it for a reason,” she said. “Saying ‘Elaine, here’s a great deal for you’ may not work. It’s been done and there’s not much novelty in it. But saying ‘Elaine, because you like grills, here’s something great for you’ can work.”
O’Gorman added that different audiences will react differently when marketers indicate in an e-mail they’re monitoring customer behavior.
“Younger audiences expect you to know that they have bought something from you, but will still get freaked out if you talk about what they’ve surfed,” she said.
