Subject Line Benchmarks

Chart of the Day: How Length and Personalization Impact Email
Performance

The Email Urban Legend

I'm not talking about those awful email chain letters from the 1990s.

I'm talking about "keep your subject line length short". We all have heard this, right? I call this an email urban legend because it had never been correctly tested but it has always been accepted. But is this correct? Should we just accept these email legends?

Always question

It's hard to know what is an email urban legend and what is researched advise. The answer is to always look for research statistics. 10 years ago, short subject lines probably were true, but with a number of different devices available is that still true?

Chart

If we look at some authentic research like the chart below, we can see that only 5% of the emails in the research had a subject line count of 1-20. However, these are the best performing with a click-to-open rate of 12.9%. The emails with a character count of 61 and over are only in 21% of the emails but they performed better with a click-to-open rate of 8.9%. The most adopted length is 21-60 character and this was the worst performing at 8.5%.

Final thoughts

Being email marketers, we need to fill many diverse roles. This research has shown we are not only investigators but scientists. Now remember my little email geeks, these statistics may be true for this chart, but it may not be true for your customers. Always test, research and experiment.

• Source: Subject Line Benchmarks
• Sample Size: 7 billion emails sent in Q2 2017
• Recommended Resource: Email Subject Line Guide