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.

Email marketing case studies from the Hotel and travel industry from Email marketing reports.

Techcrunch lowdown on tripr.tv – hotel video guide where users are rewarded for their contributions.

“The Email Standards Project works with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email”.

For anyone involved in email marketing and the challenges in ensuring your creations render consistently across clients this initiative will be much appreciated and gladly supported.

Launched late last year the project is already working, with Yahoo promising to support all of their recommendations.

On another note, we recommend Litmus to painlessly test your designs – we use it every week for all our email marketing campaigns.

Oh, and the BBC is reporting this morning that Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for £22.4bn.

When a new email drops in your inbox how do you decide whether to open it?

Deciding factors usually include recognition and reputation. Do you know the sender and have you had a good experience with them?

Another is subject lines. Whatever the aim of your email marketing message, you won’t succeed if it isn’t opened. Yesterday evening I received an email from the ‘TravelMole Press Zone’ with the subject line ‘WTM 2007 Press Release’. Pretty dull.

A finely tuned subject line is perhaps the simplest short-term way to help improve your email marketing results but so often overlooked in preference for the copy within. In this case it was about developments in Dubai.

Why is it so important to get right? Along with the ‘From’ column it’s the only bit of information that users see when they scan their crammed inbox – even more so as WTM approaches!

There is no one best method, keep testing and adapting. Here are some links for writing successful subject lines.

- The Art of Writing E-Mail Subject Lines
- Optimizing Your Subject & From Lines for Email Clients
- Email Subject Lines that actually work