More and more customers are using our automated A/B campaign testing tool to see what subject lines work best, and what day/time works best.

So right now, I’m looking at A/B split data across tons of campaigns. This is a real gold mine for email marketing research, so I was hoping to discover some universal truths that debunk what the “experts” tell us. Like, “Wednesdays are always best, not Mondays, so in your face!” Turns out, the only thing I’ve really learned is that all the expert tips out there on email marketing (mine included) are worthless. The results are all over the board. At first I was frustrated by the lack of consistency in all this data. Then, I realized that this is exactly the whole point—there is no silver bullet. Everything depends on your company, your offer, your list, etc. The only way to tell what works is to test, test, test.

But I am looking across all these amazing stats, and noticing some interesting patterns. For example, personalizing your subject line (such as with “FNAME”) doesn’t seem to help open rates very much. In fact, it can actually hurt…

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