We reviewed 5 million emails and text messages sent from Agent Legend campaigns. We analyzed the population as a whole and then compared that to the top 500 highest-performing campaigns. It turns out both Agent Legend groups are pretty good at integrating personalization into their campaigns.
17.9% of all Agent Legend sent emails used merge tags in the subject line. And 41.9% of all followup emails used “you” or “your” in the subject line. If you can’t personalize your email with a merge tag, using “you” and “your” is the second-best option. Some emails used “me” or “mine,” and those did not perform as well. And 57.3% of all emails used either a merge tag or you/your in the subject line.
For the email body, most emails utilized some type of personalization. 86.7% of all emails contained merge tags, and 98.3% used the “you” and “your” pronouns. In total, between 99.1% of all email messages contained some type of personalization.
Yay, Way to go!
According to Yes Marketing research, emails with personalized subject lines generate 50% higher open rates than emails without personalization.
Instapage claims that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates. Yet 70% of marketers don’t use personalization in their emails. It’s a head-scratcher, right? Why wouldn’t you personalize your emails?
We (obviously) recommend you to personalize (with merge tags) any Agent Legend campaign where you have enough data. Your leads will feel like you are talking directly to them.
Even if you can’t personalize your subject lines with the lead’s name, use words like “you” and “your” can still work with a similar effect. Campaign Monitor says that you can achieve a 22% increase in open rates when you personalize emails with words like “you” and “your.” If you can use the lead’s first name, you can achieve around 24.2% increase (WorldData Research 2019, Retention Science Study 2014).
Additional Recommendations
Any additional recommendations we could make based on our observations would be to use merge tags more frequently in the subject line to increase open rates. As stated earlier only 57.3% of all emails used some type of personalization in the subject line. Most used the pronouns “you” or “your.” We’d encourage each user to revisit their campaigns and examine their email subject lines to see if they can improve the level of personalization in each campaign.
The best combination would be to add merge tag personalization AND context to the subject line. A few good examples of using merge tags might look like the following:
- [[FirstName]], your inquiry about [[Property: Street Address]]
- Real estate question [[FirstName]]
- [[FirstName]] I’m here when you’re ready
- Checking in regarding [[Property: Street Address]]
- [[FirstName]], am I sending you the wrong homes?
- Property inquiry for [[Property: Street Address]]
- [[FirstName, let’s talk about your property search
- [[FirstName]], here are your neighborhood values
- [Zillow]: [[Property: Street Address]]
Learn more about writing personalized email subject lines with our article 9 Tips for Writing the Perfect Email Subject Line.
