Personalized e-mails boost open rates, according to a MailerMailer
study. The e-mail service provider found that personalized "subject"
lines in particular increased the number of times recipients opened
their mailings. The "subject" line is so important that, even when marketers have
recipients’ permission, the wrong line can still mean trouble.

"The e-mail’s ‘from’ and
’subject’ lines become key elements that help recipients quickly decide
whether the e-mail is spam," said David Hallerman, senior analyst at
eMarketer.

"Yet legitimate marketers confuse such seemingly simple issues by
sending messages from different groups within their companies," Mr.
Hallerman said, "and hence with various ‘from’ lines.

"Or they use ’subject’ lines that they hope will entice the recipient but are often not clear enough," he said.

A December 2006 study by the E-Mail Sender and Provider Coalition and Ipsos
confirmed how crucial "from" and "subject" lines are. About seven in 10
US Internet users said they judged these lines when deciding whether to
report an e-mail as spam.

The MailerMailer study also found that open rates have continued to
decline, as they have since 2004, as more people started using e-mail
programs that disable the “automatic image downloading" setting.

To track open rates, HTML e-mails contain an invisible image
measuring 1×1 pixel. When a recipient enables images to display, the
sending servers can track when the image was displayed and by whom.

Even though open rates have gone down, click rates remain steady,
suggesting that people are still reading their e-mail despite the
lower-reported open rates.

Via eMarketer