“How did an 18-year old intern beat an Alchemy Worx subject line expert in a split test?” You might think there isn’t much ‘Naked’ about a run-of-the-mill subject line split test but this one was a little different. Here’s why…

Subject lines are often given the least time and effort when an email campaign is created, but they are one of the biggest factors in an email’€™s success. There is just no single rule, tactic or word that works every time. Best practices sometimes fail and A/B testing is flawed by the time variable when a test is repeated or rolled out.

The Amazon Fire Phone entered the Smartphone market last year but following a lukewarm reception and disappointing sales, it has been overlooked by many – including email marketers.

However with the weight of one of the world’s largest online retailers behind it, we doubt this will be the last we see of it. And let’s not forget that there are already people out there viewing emails on this device.

So how does the Amazon Fire Phone handle email, and what does it mean for how you design and code? Here we take a look at some of the key rendering and display issues you should be aware of.

Problem 1: Spelinge misteakes

These are the sort of questions we get asked very often here at Alchemy Worx, and they’re ones we’ve thought long and hard about. The answer isn’t a simple yes or no, however – for the very good reason that we think these are actually the wrong questions. Clients are often under pressure to meet open and click rate targets, and many marketers obsessively compare their scores with the industry average. But the problem with these rates is that they are very blunt instruments, of limited value for the sophisticated email marketer. Clicks and opens only tell you about the individual campaign or message – they tell you nothing about the people you’re trying to reach, engage, convert and sell to. Knowing, for instance, that your emails have an average open rate of 20%, 30% or even 40% doesn’t actually tell you very much about the impact your email campaign is having on your subscribers. You need to be looking not at how the campaign behaves but at how the people who got the message are behaving.

When it comes to email, the long tail is very long and very powerful indeed. Typically, 25% of the sales generated by a single email campaign happen more than 3 weeks after it was sent out, according to our research. The half-life of your open and click response can be measured in hours – typically 24-48 hours – but when it comes to sales the half-life of an email campaign isn’t measured in hours but in days – typically a week or more.

Why you shouldn’t write off your unresponsive email subscribers Conventional marketing wisdom tells us removing inactive subscribers from your mailing list is good practice – but is it?

Here, we turn that wisdom on its head. Find out why inactive subscribers are still valuable to your business and explore how you can reactivate them.

When you run an email test, do you test for the right reasons and in a way that will deliver real results?

At Alchemy Worx, we’d be the first to agree that testing can be an extremely valuable investment of time – we certainly see it as an essential element of any long-term email marketing strategy. But the most valuable tests require a significant amount of resource across all elements – from planning, design and HTML production, to deployment and analysis of the results.