As you probably already know, personalizing the email subject line with a name increases the response tremendously. It’s something I’ve been doing for years with all my autoresponder messages.

Well, that got me to wondering if it makes a difference exactly where that personalization is placed in the email subject line… so I decided to do some testing.

I tested several of my lists and kept the subject line exactly the same except for the placement of the [firstname]. In other words, I split tested like this:

1. [firstname] Subject line of the email

Email subject line test #1 went out to 50% of my subscribers.

2. Subject line of the email [firstname]

Email subject line test #2 went out to the other 50% of my subscribers (that’s why it’s called a split test – because it’s 50/50).

Here’s my email subject line test results:

Subject line #2 waaay out performed #1… but not in the way that you might think.

Both subject lines had about the same open rate, but subject line #2 averaged a 2% better click through rate. But that wasn’t the number that surprised me.

What really surprised me was that putting the personalization at the beginning of the subject line produced a 1.59% spam complaint rate! Subject line #2, where the [firstname] was at the end of the subject line, resulted in a 0% spam complaint rate.

In other words, split testing showed that putting the [firstname] at the beginning of the email subject line looks more like spam to email recipients… even if it’s an email message (like a newsletter) that they are expecting.

Those results were very surprising to me.

So, as you might imagine, I’ve changed all my subject lines to reflect these results. All the [firstname] tags are at the end of my subject lines.

I wonder if my response would be better with the name in the middle of the subject line? Time for another email split test!

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