Without strong subject lines, that beautiful design won’t be viewed anyway.

‘Open rate’ is perhaps the most important metric in an email campaign, so well-thought strategy and testing should be applied. According to Super Office, 47% of people open emails based on the subject line alone.

Of course, open rate success is largely based on whether the company sending them is liked by the viewer. If your list (or your company) sucks, the metrics will also suck.

Assuming the list is solid, an attractive subject line can ensure the email deployment is a success. Opus Creative tests the waters before the final deployment in conjunction with creative A/B testing.

We’ve found that subject line testing should be broad.

Testing synonyms with the same overall message against each other won’t provide statistically relevant results. For example, “Now Announcing Entertainment” or “Entertainment Released” yielded little difference in open rate.

“When you change the entire voice or focus, that’s when you find out if people are responding more to one thing over another,” says Todd McIlhenny, Opus Creative’s Business Director and lead strategist. “One example test during the Dell Technologies World campaign would be writing subject lines about entertainment and gifts. Then we see which subject line wins.”

Over the course of the campaign, topics within the subject line are tested against each other. To the surprise of nobody, subject lines discussing free gifts were the most opened emails. People like free stuff – who knew?

Every email gets a subject line test, no questions asked.

For the Dell Technologies World email campaign, getting the subject line right is baked in.

“We always want to test a subject line,” says Lauren Featherstone, Program Manager at Opus Creative. “Even a 0.5% difference on 2 million people is substantial enough to be a game-changer.”

An interesting development when testing subject lines occurs within the body of the email. Prevailing logic was that the first blade within the email body must correspond to the subject line topic.

That’s not the case.

It’s smart to bury the subject line topic later in the email, so the viewer is exposed to other marketing messages the sender wants to convey.

“We found that people who click on a subject line will go looking for that content within the email,” Todd says. “We can give them the content up front, but they may not see the rest of the email. They’re absorbing more of the messaging, and obviously that’s better.”