The key message here I think is to conduct a continuous testing process. Don’t just test once and then make long term conclusions. Subject line split-testing and from name testing is an iterative process and should be monitored closely. As many of your readers have suggest what works for a B2B audience will differ significantly to a consumer audience and sectors within each will have their own nuances.

Small amendments can have surprising results so evolve your testing to only change one element at a time.

It’s insincere if it’s a telco or massive retailer though. If you got a message from Richard Branson would you think he’d written it? You might well open it though!

Sounds a plausible theory Darren. I think there may be several factors at work. For example, it may be as banal as the CEO’s name getting people to pay more attention and thus realizing that it’s not what they want and unsubscribing…

One thing to note on from line tests is to repeat them down the road. If you start using a person’s name (particularly one that isn’t recognisable), some of the early attention boost might come from curiosity, which won’t last more than an email or two.

There’s a more general principle there about the short-term value of novelty.

Tim – thanks for those numbers. It is truly amazing how measuring (or focusing) on the wrong thing can lead to unwanted results. It seems obvious, but not assuming anything must almost be one’s mantra when creating an email marketing campaign.

Being new to this I can only speculate why adding the CEO’s name to the email would ultimately lead to an increase in the unsubscribe rate, however as a consumer I will say that I am used to receiving information from companies and expect that a newsletter be like a digest of all the information I am looking for from a company. If I see the name of the CEO as the sender, I might even subconsciously be thinking that I am getting a different newsletter, one that features more of his thoughts. For me, this is like the note from the editor at the beginning of a magazine. I am interested in what the magazine has to say, not the editor, and so I almost always skip that section. If Wired were renamed Chris Anderson’s Wired or Wired: from the desktop of Chris Anderson – I would immediately be less interested in the magazine.

I don’t know if that comparison is apt, but again, that’s my speculation.

I’ve done some testing myself (in the b2b world) where adding a person’s name increased opens by 20%, we also tested formatted html emails very much like personal email as opposed to html w/ images increasing the click throughs and conversions (obviously, depends on the market you’re in)

Does anybody have any thoughts on the deliverability issues with outlook 2010?