Today, I checked the sales numbers for an email A/B test I sent a couple days ago.
Roughly speaking, subject line A had 50% more opens… 50% more clickthroughs… and 50% fewer sales.
Let me repeat that:
50% more people clicked through the email to the advertorial…
But 50% FEWER people actually got out their credit card and handed over their banking ones and zeros.
And yes, in case you are wondering, the subject line was the only difference among the two email versions, and the numbers were big enough to be statistically significant, whatever that means.
This is a dramatic illustration of something I’ve written about before. And that is, for this particular list of about 50,000 ecommerce buyers, we’ve seen an inverse relationship between opens and sales. I even calculated once that each 1% bump in open rates cost us about $100 in sales. But I’ve never seen crazy inverse numbers like with the email above.
So what’s going on?
Who the hell knows. My guess is that different subject lines 1) select different segments of the market and 2) put prospects into different buying/unbuying moods.
Whatever the case, I think this example is good to keep in mind.
I’m not saying that for your market, you will see the same inverse relationship. But it definitely makes sense to be wary of increasing open rates for the sake of increasing open rates.
So what should you do instead?
I heard a good piece of advice once from marketer Travis Sago. Travis has made a lot of money with his emails and is a bit of an expert on the topic. His advice is to write your subject lines as though you have to pay for each open. Qualify your email prospects. Use market-specific language. Do whatever you can so only those people who are most likely to buy will open, and nobody else.
Speaking of most likely to buy:
If you want more tested and proven email marketing advice, well, it’s not something I write about all that often in my daily email newsletter. But I do write about it on occasion. Plus I write about marketing and influence and persuasion more broadly. In case you are interested, you can sign up to my newsletter here.