JMCommunity Contest: Subject Line and Preview Text Winning Combos
We’re going back to the envelope with this month’s Community Contest.
There’s more to a great email campaign than a beautiful email design and brilliant content. You’ve got to nail your subject line and preview text first.
So for this Community Contest we want to know what subject line and preview text combo helped you achieve email campaign success. Whatever success meant for your campaign–purchases, event sign-ups, downloads, etc–because measuring subject line success by opens is all wrong.
Share the subject line and preview text that elevated your campaign. How did you come to choose that subject line and preview text combo? How did you measure the campaign's success?
We’ll pick our favorite combo, with the winner getting:
- $50 Amazon gift voucher
- 2 free months of Litmus Plus
- A Litmus care package (t-shirts, stickers, etc.)
The contest is now closed. Find out who won here.
Feel free to keep sharing your best subject lines/preview text combos with other Community members.
Pizza by @miahsix and @camillepalu
Subjectline: Cowabunga Dude!
Preview Text: Eat like the world’s most fearsome fighting Team
Preheader: Build Your Pizza Online
Our favorite subjectline/preview/preaheader combo comes form a Pizza email we sent out. We've recently become very cognizant about the way we're presenting, building, and combining the phrasing around our emails. Our goal at table tr td is to bring fun, innovative, creative email pieces to life. This combo hit all those notes and hopefully brought people a smile.
The way we measure success is the amount of interactions and communications we get about the email.
opens: 82.35% (126 opens)
click through rate: 57.14%
ftaf: 1
twitter: 8 Twitter Shares + Lee Munroe Tweet (2 Retweets 8 Likes) + Jason Rodriguez Tweet (4 Retweets 7 Likes) + Kevin Tweet (1 Retweet 5 Likes) + Glenn Smith Tweet reaching out to 4 different pizza chains
slack: 30 minute pizza topping conversation in the emailgeeks Slack channel
podcasts: Email Design Podcast #32
blog post: Jason Rodriguez's Favorite Emails - September 2016
codepen: table tr td (16 views), Really Good Emails (5 views)
dribbble: 66 views and 8 likes
Subject line: ⚡ FLASH SALE ⚡
Preheader: Get an extra 25% off already reduced flash sale items > FREE SHIPPING on orders $75+
How did you come to choose that subject line and preview text combo?
We've tested with emojis in the past and always seen a lift in open rates when we use them. Using litmus we've identified over 60% of openers are using iPhones/iPads so we are confident our strategic emojis as "bookends" will help the email to stand out in the inbox. We don't use all caps frequently, but haven't seen our delivery suffer because of the potential "spaminess"
Our strategy here was to create a short SL that stands out in the inbox with straightforward preheader text that gives up front details about the sale (plus the added incentive reminder about free shipping).
How did you measure the campaign's success?
Overall, we tracked revenue as the success for this campaign. Secondary to that, we look at lift in conversion rates. This campaign was super successful! This was one of three Emails in the campaign and performed the best on all fronts!
I'm curious to know who won. :)
Same here, I keep refreshing the blog page too. I think I broke it or something :P
Blog post will be coming up shortly! With the winner included.
Yeay, thanks!
I keep coming back for updates and for other entries. LOL. I got excited!
Subject line: 2 More Days...Are you ready?
Preview Text: #WorldHiringDay is Wednesday, September 14, 2016. No Resumes. No Phone Tag. Just you being you.
The subject live and preview text combination was chosen to give job candidates a sense of urgency and preparation. The combo also connected email promotion with our social promotion by use of a hashtag. The combo resonated with our target audience. Campaign success was measured by the number of digital interviews created.
Subject = Secrets of a Super Stepper
Preview = 27 fun ideas to pack more steps into your day
We send offer-based emails to our database of ‘lapsed’ members at regular intervals throughout the year – subject lines have tended to be sales focused.
We produced a blog piece detailing a live member’s fitness successes and drew in the readers with some clever (we thought) alliteration in the subject. The preview text clearly signposted the motivational content waiting for the reader.
The success of the campaign hinged on sales of Fitbits when purchased with one of our membership packages. Sales tripled year-on-year!
Subject Line: Thursdays are the pancakes of weekdays 🍳 🍴
Preview Text: We spent some time cleaning up the email to make this Thursday extra special
Test & Measurement:
Our email success is based mainly on clicks and actual replies from people. Our content relies heavily on the headlines of others (we use their headlines in our weekly roundup of articles), so the clicks on these vary from week to week. In another section of this email, we also show off some of our favorite emails we've posted over the past week. Clicks to these stay pretty consistent. Was this Thursday extra special? Not really. But we wanted to put more emphasis on our efforts of curating.
Our hypothesis was that the subject line would get people's attention from the usual reporting style we do so that people would read the we-made-this-for-you preheader text. Thus, with that extra feeling of receiving love and hard-work, readers would be more inclined to click on those curated emails or reply with an email.
Clicks increased by 42% from the previous 4-week average for that section of the email. And we got a couple more reply emails than usual. Maybe it was actually the reference to pancakes that did it? Either way, we were super happy with the results. But then, like most things we do, we forgot about those results, until just now as we were looking what we've done in the past. Thanks for conjuring up good memories, Litmus.
Subject = Hey Instagrammers !
Preview = Say hello to your new classmates !
We send emails for an international study brand offering access courses to UK higher education. For this Septembers intake we ran a cross channel email and social campaign encouraging new students to send travel selfies on their way to their new colleges with the corresponding hashtag #Sayhello on Instagram. This provided the chance for students to connect with each other before arriving while providing us with some great student generated content for promotion across our other social channels !
Breaking away from previous coperate designs we included fun gifs based on travel which changed with our reminders, a ( plane travelling across a map, packing a suitcase}.
The fun nature of our design and social integration saw unprecedented data for our email team with our main brand ! New students responded really positively in interacting with our brands social channels after being prompted by email which was great !
64.27% HTML Open Rate ! ( 295 Unique Opens )
50.51% Click to Open Ratio ! ( 149 Unique Clicks )
Across all our brands we had over 50 photos posted which was a great success ! :)
Subject line: Email is history
Preheader: Sorry, we meant “Email’s history”. Our bad.
Not mine though, but from Phrasee 👌🏻
http://eepurl.com/cjVzI9
Subject Line: YSM Clearance Sale up to 70% Off
Preview: YSM is clearing out - huge discounts until supplies last!
How did you come to choose that subject line and preview text combo?
We chose this subject line and preview to make it simple — the store is closing and there is a clearance sale ongoing.
We have a loyal clientele, and upon announcement that the store is closing (in a previous email), clients reacted through messaging and social media. We sent out this email a few days after the announcement so that clients can get what they need before removal of the social media accounts, and the store.
How did you measure the campaign's success?
Simple. Our stocks have depleted and we have actually sold most of our stocks! Our clients are almost panic-buying.
Subject: I think you're going to like this
Preheader: This issue of Madison Magazine will make you bleed purple!
We always send an email out at magazine publishing time to our readers, but it’s historically been a rather bland email that comes from the magazine.
This issue was sent from the editor, and we spiced up the language within the email, making it a personal invitation to read the latest magazine and less of a courtesy informational announcement that there was an issue coming.
Our open and click rates were higher than the email usually receives. But what blew us away was the number of forwards that the email forward rate increased by 409%!! And, our editor got a flurry of positive responses. We marked the email as a success because it generated conversations about Madison.
Subject line: Benny is back!
Preview Text: Our Benny collection was such a hit, we've brought it back!
This subject line and preview text was for a fashionable designer style chair which we had good results with previously. So when we launched a reminder campaign with the above subject line and preview text - it turned out to be our most profitable email yet! Social blew up and we went out of stock pretty fast. It seems that people do like reminders when they're of nice things that they've previously seen... or maybe it was just the subject line that did it!