I just tried an interesting experiment and the results were not what I expected.
My professional writing has two very distinct audiences: public relations professionals interested in how PR works differently online, and nonprofit people interested in measurable marketing. I've learned over time that these audiences really can't be meshed (or perhaps I'm not a talented enough writer to mesh them). After talking to a number of you, I have begun writing seperate articles targeted towards each.
About 4 hours ago I sent out my weekly email with two different articles, one about Google Wave for PR people and one about measuring the effectiveness of third party donation forms for nonprofits. I split my list and A/B tested my subject lines:
Google Wave; Measure 3rd party donation forms
and one with audience tags:
PR: Google Wave; NONPROFITS: Measure 3rd party donation forms
which one do you think got a better open rate? To find out, I've obscured the answer in white text below. Select the following paragraph with your mouse to see:
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The audience-tagged subject line got 13 unique opens out of 77 recipients, or 16.88% open rate. The plain subject line received 18 unique opens out of 80 recipients, or a 22.5% open rate, a third more. More opens could come in over time, but that's a pretty interesting number.
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