We manage numerous email marketing campaigns for our clients, either directly or working closely with travel PR and marketing agencies.

As well as consumer targeted emails these also include a number of campaigns reaching out to the media and trade. For the latter we’ve found short stories with images and read on links help set the emails apart from ones with reams of text and uncompressed images.

I’ve talked before about the importance of a subject line to stimulate interest to open the email.

Something we’ve been implementing more of late is A/B testing for subject lines. Two subject lines are created – a subset of the subscriber list receives Subject Line A, another subset receives Subject Line B.

The open rates of both are then monitored for a period of time. The subject line that leads to the most opens is selected as the winner and all remaining recipients receive this subject line.

It’s a simple and quick way to give your content a greater chance of being read. Instead of open rates, one can determine the winning subject line by the highest click through rates.

Or use A/B testing to test different ‘From’ names or email content itself. Make sure you link your email campaigns to whatever analytics software to get the full picture.

Figure 1. x axis - time, y axis - open rates. Subject line A - red and Subject line B - blue

The above diagram demonstrates the benefit of carrying this out. The red subject line was the first one chosen.

After convincing the client to try A/B testing, they created a second subject line, shown in blue.

The second subject line greatly out performed the first in terms of open rate.

Read more about our travel email marketing services and past work.