An email address is at the heart of people’s ID and makes possible a massive range of our daily interactions – with each other, with brands and shops, with government and employers.

Popular opinion states that an unopened email means your subscriber is disengaged and uninterested in making a purchase – we disagree. Unopened email communications have a tangible impact on brand awareness and can lead to purchase activity across all channels.

The colon (Test Worx: How many clicks is an image worth?) generated a higher level of opens, but a lower level of clicks.

In issues of Email-Worx, we’ve used a variety of words and symbols – colons, dashes, plus signs etc – to divide the propositions within our subject lines. In analysing the performance of these different separators, we’ve discovered that there’s more to punctuation than meets the eye…

Subject lines are one of the first things your subscribers see when they go into their inbox and have a proven and measurable impact on whether they go on to open, click and convert. Which is why so many email marketers spend so much time AB testing their SLs.

As you can see from the chart below, subject line B “Incentivise your email program without devaluing your brand” went into the lead almost immediately, and after 15 days had generated 32% more unique opens and 20% more unique clicks than subject line A “Incentive Programs: Your guide to giving”.

The results are in! Chasing opens would have lost Obama the election There is little doubt in my mind that email was the No. 1 non-political contributor to Obama’s win in the 2012 US Presidential race. 75% of the $934 million raised by Obama was attributed to digital and nearly all of that $700 million was raised through email1. That fact alone is phenomenal.