FREE is Back!

E-mail marketers are increasingly bucking conventional wisdom and using the word "free" in subject lines, and they're doing it with success, Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president of Worldata said at the Direct Marketing Days in New York conference this June in "Live from DMDNY."

For the last several years, conventional wisdom has had it that using the word "free" in an e-mail subject line was a sure way to get messages blocked as spam by Internet service providers. The reason: "Free" was a word commonly used in subject lines by spammers.

However, when asked in 2007 if putting free in e-mail subject lines lifted response rates, 47% of marketers surveyed by Worldata said yes, according to Schwedelson. This compares to 35% in 2006 who said putting the word free in e-mail subject lines increased response.

"Marketers have been avoiding the word 'free' for the last two years," he said. "But the trend is starting to go back in the other direction. 'Free' is starting to make a big comeback."
Schwedelson said that though some spam filters still flag the word free, some marketers are getting results that outweigh the possibility their e-mail might be tagged as possible spam.

"What does this mean? It means your e-mail is still getting filtered, but the response rates you're getting by using the word 'free' in the subject line are so much better than when you're not using the word 'free' in the subject line, that many marketers willing to have their messages filtered just to see that better response rate," he said.

Schwedelson added that many of the well-known content rules about subject lines are seemingly changing.

"All the rules are going out the door," he said. "Capital letters are working, exclamation points are working. If you have written rules that you say you can't break, you have to break out of that mold and start testing everything all over again.

Schwedelson added that subject lines with time elements in them, such as a date, or a day of the week, or even the word "limited time only," increase open rates by as much as 22%.
He also recommended that when testing two different subject lines, rather than A/B spilt testing the campaign to an entire file of, say, 50,000 names, split test the campaign to just 10,000 of the addresses.

This way, after a winner has been determined -- usually in about 48 hours -- the marketer can send the winner to the other 40,000.

Split testing a campaign to an entire file "is a waste of a lot of good e-mail," said Schwedelson. "This way, instead of 50% of your readers getting a bad subject line, just 5% of your audience got a bad subject line."