10 Great Ideas for Your Next Subject Line Test

Subject line testing is that one email best practice that all B2B marketers know is a good idea, and yet very few of us do it consistently.  The common excuse is time: when you’re under the gun to get that Webinar invitation out by next week, the last thing you need is one more complexity added to the process.

subject line testingConsistent subject line testing, however, executed correctly, can be a main driver for achieving steady improvement in open rates and overall email performance.  One of the key factors to effective testing is specificity: a subject line pair should isolate one, single element – a word, a phrase – as the testing variable.  Testing two entirely different subject lines may provide you a winner and loser, but you’ll have no idea why one version performed better than the other.  Knowing why one subject line generated a higher response is a learning you can then continue to leverage going forward.

To make the process of choosing testing pairs easier, here’s a handy list of test ideas to use as a reference for your next campaign:

1.  Specific vs. General

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2.  Personalization (e.g. Name, Location, Industry)

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3.  Urgency

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Only 3 days Until Our Email Best Practices Webinar

4.  Company Name/Branding

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Spear’s Guide to Top B2B Email Mistakes

5.  Positive vs. Negative

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6.  Copy Length

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7.  Statement vs. Question

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8.  Numbers as Digits vs. Words

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Why Forty-five Percent of Companies Fail this Simple Test

9.  Offer vs. No Offer

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10 Great Examples of Demand Generation Content

10.  Topic vs. Benefit

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Discover the Keys to Generating Leads from Your Blog

For more ideas on how to improve email results, check out our infographic: 29 Tips to Improve Email Campaign Performance.

Thanks to Hannah Scott, Associate Copywriter at Spear, for her contributions to this post.

Photo by Diego PH on Unsplash

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