The Subject Line Dead Zone?
Jul 07 2008
I have been reading over this study a few times now. It is well done and yet totally confounds my sense of thinking around keeping it short, driving home the point, telling me what to do, and being relevant. So if you have not read it yet it is the Alchemy Worx study that is reporting longer subject lines have a great impact on read to click as opposed to shorter subject lines that are just read…
They looked at over 200 million emails over a 5 year period of time with some great brands. Now what really got me going was that there is a DEAD ZONE in between 60-70 characters in a subject line. A little email marketing Bermuda Triangle that just kills reads, opens and clicks…. Wild. And even crazier was that between 6 -10 words in a email subject line created the same effect.
Now I was reading (and for those of you that know me well) and re-reading for the THIRD time and found that not only was this a great study worth vetting in some tests, but the documentation and graphs to support it really helped me to see what they found.
Posted by Dylan Boyd at 2:00 PM
Published in Case Study, Conversion, Studies & Research on Monday, July 7th, 2008
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I am excited to join a great panel for an upcoming Software Association of Oregon event called 
July 7th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
I don’t think the survey’s results are incompatible with your existing sense of what makes a good subject line.
It doesn’t say longer is better, it says use as much space as you need to communicate what the subject line needs to communicate. Or put another way, don’t artifically keep it short just to meet some arbitrary maximum subject line length.
The study is very enlightening, but there is a danger that people misinterpret it. More thoughts here, also based on correspondence with the authors:
http://www.email-marketing-reports.com/iland/2008/06/subject-line-research-has-many-lessons.html