I emailed My Year in 2021 to ~2,700 people. It had 3 experiments.
Do friends open my mail more than strangers?
I split the list into 2 groups:
- My contacts: ~1,000 people I knew (I’ve mailed them)
- Strangers: ~1,700 people I didn’t know (I’ve never mailed them)
My guess: strangers would open the mail 30% less often.
Reality: They opened it 40% less. 50% of my contacts opened the mail, vs only 28% of strangers.
Are the first and last links most clicked?
I sent 2 versions of the email to my contacts. The order of links was different.
- Book reviews did 30% worse at #6 than #1 (62% down to 43%)
- PyCon talk did 67% worse at #4 than #1 (10.4% down to 3.4%)
- Landmark course did 7% worse at #4 than #2 (20.7% down to 19.2%)
- write more about did 100% worse at #4 than #2 (4.4% down to 0%)
- Tools for Data Science did 39% better at #2 than #6 (17% down to 10%)
- Pranayama did 62% better at #5 than #3 (3.4% up to 5.5%)
My guess: the first and last links would be clicked 20% more often than those in the middle.
Reality: The links higher up were clicked more often 5/6 times. Click rates drop but don’t climb up at the end.
Do provocative subject lines increase open rates?
I sent 2 versions of the email to my contacts. The subject lines were different.
- Bland: “My year in 2021”
- Provocative: “Where I failed in 2021”
My guess: the provocative title will have 2X the open rate of the bland one.
Reality: The open rates were about the same (49% for provocative, 51% for bland). Either the second title was not provocative enough, or the bland was interesting enough. I need to re-run this experiment.
Learnings
I learned 3 things.
- Strangers open my mails less than I thought. Make more friends 🙂
- People scan emails top-down (not top-down, then bottom-up – like I do) and click on top links. Move the main link first.
- I’m no good at creating high-contrast variations in content. Take help.
