[Case Study] How to Get a 47% Higher Email Open Rate
Listen on the go by downloading the audio of today’s video.
Join us on the journey to predictable growth. Each week we tackle a different level of your funnel, from traffic and email list growth to sales conversions and upsells. Sign up for our newsletter here to get daily 10-minute #MattHacks videos.
- In this Matt Hack, Matt discusses his recent research on the best format and conventions to use for increased open rates
- He’ll show you how a simple tweak to your subject line can drastically improve business
Hey, guys. Matt Ackerson, the founder of Growbo.com, as you may already know. I’m broadcasting to you live with another Matt Hack video from beautiful, Medellin, Colombia in the background.
What I want to share with you today is some more original research. At the moment, we’re testing the best format and conventions to use for higher open rates and click-through rates.
If you can achieve that, it means more people coming back to your website and more people that you're engaging with.
What Did We Research?
Before I share the data, I want to explain what we were actually testing. For this experiment, we were looking at email subject lines. More specifically, we were testing two specific subject lines in terms of how we would format them: casual case and camel case.
In the video, I first show you an example of casual case. Typically, in that type of message, we would just capitalized the first word in the title of what we were sending, whether it was an article or another Matt Hack video.
In this particular example, the title is “Want to visualize your sales funnel”. It’s casual because it’s the way you would want to write an email to a friend.
The second example demonstrates camel case. The title, “35 Examples of Highly-successful Social Media Campaigns”, is more formal and clearly shows that it's the title of something. As you can see, the first letter of each word (except for prepositions and conjunctions) is capitalized.
What Did We Discover?
In both cases, we had a total of more than 300 clicks—but the averages turned out to be quite different.
Camel case had an average open rate of 23%, versus an average open rate of 15.7% for casual case. Click-through rates were higher for camel case as well, but not by as much: 1.67% click-through rate versus 1.4%.
So, what does that mean? If you go with the camel case format, according to this data, you would be likely to be improving your click-through and open rates by up to 47%. Maybe better.
On the other hand, if you go with a casual case subject line, you could be missing out on 20% of clicks, or 47% of opens.
That's massive, especially if you're doing multiple campaigns over the course of a year. That's a lot of people that you're just not engaging with and potential sales lost.
Matt’s Recommendations
A recent article from HubSpot noted that 33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone.
I definitely found that to be true—and I'm really happy that we did this test. I think it gives you a great idea for something that you can change, or tweak (or stick with, if you're already doing it), in terms of those subject lines.
Just note: I want you to take this data with a grain of salt. Different audiences respond differently. It all depends on who they are, their relationship with you, and how they perceive your brand.
If you're looking for a starting point, I would recommend going with the camel case. It’s never a bad idea to start on a more formal note.
But test it for yourself!
If you have a more informal relationship with your audience, you may find that casual case works better for you.
Final Thoughts
You wouldn't think that such a small change could have such a significant impact, but apparently, it does!
So I encourage you, again, to test this for yourself. Depending on your audience, you could even use our data as a starting point to get more clicks and a better open rate.
If you'd like me to consider answering a question in a future Matt Hack video, I encourage you to leave a comment or shoot us an email. I'll be happy to consider answering it in an upcoming video.
If you have a question regarding sales funnels—whether it's about setting yours up, or how we do ours—please write in. I love hearing from you.
If I can help, and if it's going to benefit the rest of our audience as well, I'd love to consider answering it.
Further, if you want to build your own sales funnel and eliminate all of the guesswork, I encourage you to check out our Sales Funnel Blueprint.
The Sales Funnel Blueprint is one of our most popular products and it's super affordable. It's designed to be that way, as it's a good introductory online course for you to get in, get your hands dirty, and start benefiting right now.
Whether you're an agency or you're a freelancer looking to level up your lead generation, this course can teach you how to automatically generate thousands of fresh leads every month without risking $1 on expensive ads.
One last note—if you want to get daily Matt hacks like this in your email inbox, I encourage you to go to our website, find Matt Hacks in the navigation bar, and sign up.
All right, so until next time, my name is Matt Ack, in the Matt hat, delivering you your daily dose of Matt hacks. I'll see you in the next video. Take care, keep hustling, stay focused.
Want more sales? Download my
