Written by Andrew Preshong, Email Marketing Manager at Simplicity Lone Beacon, and edited by Marcus Roth, Senior Director of Email Marketing, Automation, and Content at Simplicity Lone Beacon.
Over the past 7 months, our email team conducted an extensive review of our advisors’ Complimentary Dinner Event emails to find out how to better optimize email subject lines.
For those unfamiliar, the email subject line serves as the title of an email and is the first thing recipients notice in their inbox. Its effectiveness is crucial in capturing the audience’s attention, as it determines whether the email will be opened and therefore if the offer within the email will ever be seen in the first place…
Recognizing the significant role subject lines play in capturing audience attention, we tested five different subject line themes, each strategically angled to help get more people to RSVP for advisors’ dinner events.
The results, pulled from over 104,000 event emails, yielded valuable insights into what resonates most with advisors’ audiences.
Pictured below is a snapshot of our overall findings from the experiment. The subject line themes — Restaurant, Food, Topic, Exclusive Invite, and Traditional — are ranked from highest Open Rate to lowest Open Rate, containing two examples of each theme per row.
*Open Rate is the ratio of email opens to the number of emails sent.
A Breakdown of the Findings
Our analysis challenged our initial assumptions, shedding light on what truly resonates with financial advisors’ audiences in a way that compels them to take action with the material they receive.
Here are some of our key findings:
- While we expected the subject lines emphasizing the exclusive invite to be more of a hit than they were, the data told a different story, as those lagged to the back of the pack. This is why assumptions must always be tested…
- On the flip side, we were surprised by the success of restaurant-themed and topic-themed subject lines, which outperformed our original expectations. This reveals that prospects are generally more interested in the venue and the event’s topic than the fact it is “exclusive” or has limited seating.
- Subject lines like “Register for Our Upcoming Complimentary Dinner Event” may underperform due to vagueness. The ambiguity leaves room for interpretation, confusing prospects—whether it’s a high-end steak dinner or a pizza party in a conference room. In marketing, the phrase, “a confused mind says, ‘No.’” proves to be true. Email subject lines are no exception.
So, What’s Next?
Our commitment to further optimization continues with more experimentation on the horizon. In our journey to enhance our dinner event email campaigns we’ll be:
- Bidding farewell to underperforming subject line angles, focusing on the three most promising and trying out new ones as well.
- Experimenting with emojis in our subject lines for some deeper testing. 📈🍴💸🥩🥗
- Continuing to learn and adapt to the ever-changing trends in the digital landscape.
As we move forward, it’s important to emphasize that our journey is guided by hypotheses but ultimately driven by data. At Simplicity Lone Beacon, we let the data tell the story and this is just one small example of this. With data as the compass of marketing strategy, financial advisors can improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts in ways that achieve measurable results and illuminate their paths to growth.
About the Author: Marcus Roth is Simplicity Lone Beacon’s Senior Director of Data, Automation & Content. Marcus has a unique experience in B2B and B2C start-up companies ranging from enterprise-level market research of Artificial Intelligence to self-defense eCommerce products. His experience in AI market research brought him, and his research, to INTERPOL, The United Nations, and Harvard University.
About the Author: Andrew graduated from Framingham State University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing. He has professional as well as freelance experience with Digital Marketing, Social Media Management, Content Creation, and Web Design. In Andrew’s free time, he enjoys hanging with friends and family, golfing, ping pong, playing sports, and yard sale flipping.
