Top E-Mail Subject Lines Focus on ‘You’ - eMarketer

Top E-Mail Subject Lines Focus on ‘You’ - eMarketer

Marketers try for personal connection with recipients.
Polls show that marketers are aiming for personalization to make their e-mails stand out in recipients’ inboxes, and the rise of social media has made many consumers expect a more personal relationship with brands. And a look at e-mail subject lines suggests marketers are following that lead.

While in November 2008, subjects with “you” and “your” barely beat out “free” offers, usage of “you” to address recipients directly rose by 2009 to appear in more than one-fifth of e-mail subjects. On the flip side, terms such as “free” and “ship” decreased in importance.


Experian’s “2010 Digital Marketer” report said this reflected the growing savvy of marketing e-mail recipients. Consumers now expect free shipping offers, which makes them less of a selling point in e-mail subject lines.

Offers of savings in general, however, remained important, and with good reason. More than one-half of adults said they were likely to open an e-mail containing promotions or coupons, and 30% said they would forward such an e-mail to others, up from 28% in 2008.

Among multichannel retailers, for example, “save,” “off” and “% off” each appeared in about 12% of subject lines. Shopping and classifieds sites saw the highest share of traffic coming from e-mail clicks, compared with other industries, at 9%.


Experian also found that e-mails encouraging visits to stores increased by 50% compared with 2008. And the use of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” more than doubled, as Web marketers included more Black Friday offers and consumers became more familiar with the latter term.

Car Dealership Website Walkon

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CBO’s Elmendorf: U.S. Fiscal Policy on Unsustainable Path

The U.S. federal budget deficit is on a trajectory that poses “significant economic risks” and will become unsustainable, Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, said on Monday.

In a presentation delivered before the National Association for Business Economics, Mr. Elmendorf noted that the choices needed to address the medium and long-term budget deficit will be “larger and more fundamental” than in the past.

“U.S. fiscal policy is on an unsustainable path that can’t be resolved through minor tinkering,” he said. “The problem posed by the federal budget deficit not at its current level but on this trajectory… poses a growing risk to the recovery.”

Mr. Elmendorf said that if current tax policy is extended — including the tax cuts enacted by President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003 which look increasingly likely to be extended beyond their 2010 expiration — the deficit will swell from the $6 trillion baseline forecast by 2020 to just shy of $10 trillion.

In addition, the debt held by the public with current tax policies extended would soar to 90% of GDP by 2020, Mr. Elmendorf said, making the U.S. public debt load one of the world’s highest.

“The U.S. is entering unfamiliar territory in its level of public debt,” said Mr. Elmendorf. “It will be larger over the next decade than it’s been in half a century… and also unfamiliar by the standards of other developed countries.” The choice is not whether to change course from current policy, he noted, but “how quickly and in what way.” President Barack Obama has already declared a spending freeze on discretionary, nonessential outlays, but that only amounts to roughly 17% of total spending. Much of the rest of federal spending is for entitlement programs including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, defense spending and interest payments on the federal debt.

The size of U.S. entitlement programs has grown sharply since 1970, from 3.8% of GDP to 8.2% as of 2007, and is expected to hit 11.1% of GDP by 2020 thanks to an aging population of Baby Boomers and fewer workers in the system to help pay for their benefits.

Mr. Elmendorf said one reason entitlements have grown over the last few decades without being accompanied by an obvious increase in taxes or reduction in government spending is because defense spending, which few Americans directly observe, has fallen by half during the same period of time, to 4% of GDP in 2007.

That same pattern can’t be repeated in coming years, Mr. Elmendorf said. “We’ll have to pay for future growth in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid through a visible increase in the tax burden, a visible reduction in other programs or a visible reduction in these [entitlement] programs themselves,” he said.

-A Wall Street Journal Article

Roger Stix
Atlanta Business Video

Most Popular Source for News is...

A study from the Pew Research Centre found that the internet is now the third most popular source for news among Americans, behind local and national television and ahead of radio, and local and national newspapers. Among online users the most popular news subject was the weather. Separately, the Financial Times said it would soon allow readers to pay for articles online on a daily or weekly basis, charged for through PayPal.

An article from The Economist

Roger Stix

Atlanta Business Video

How to Reach Prospects Near the Bottom of the Sales Funnel

The consumer funnel takes users along a journey—awareness, favorability, consideration, intent to purchase and purchase.

Display advertising works at all stages of the funnel, bringing new prospective customers but is expensive and does not stimulate short term revenue.

Search advertising and SEO works on the lower funnel targeting those that already show interest.

Part of their attraction is the ads generate immediate revenue.

Some industries such as travel focus on Web users already in the market, meaning they lean heavily on search to target the lower funnel. On the opposite side of the spectrum, verticals such as consumer packaged goods aim to bring as many users into the purchase funnel as possible through banner advertising.

Roger Stix, Producer

Atlanta Business Video