Trends The Stash: Should more subject lines be in the form of a question?

Alex Trebec might prefer it, but should subject lines be written in the form of a question? It’s a simple concept, but one that comes up frequently. We took at look at the numbers and this is was we found.

The Goods
To find our answer we looked at over 200,000,000 emails sent by 25 different resorts over the last four years, 11,000,000 of which had questions in the subject line. Campaigns were only included in the sample if they were sent to at least 10,000 recipients. Plotted below are how open rates for these question-based subject lines compared to the averages.

After starting high in 2011 (10.6%) and quickly slipped below average before bottoming out in 2014 (-11.9%). In 2015, question-based subject lines in our sample are seeing 4.8% more opens on average than non-question subject lines.

What This Means
As much as possible, we try to analyze these trends in relation to time for the very reason we see above. Had we only looked at this sample as one data point, we would have concluded that open rates tend to perform a little below average.

But by taking a more granular approach, we see that questions may be performing better this year than last and, as a result, might be worth a shot the next time they fit your team’s marketing messages.

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