Personalized subject lines in email marketing

In the academic literature, there is a growing stream of publications that address how companies can use insights from behavioral economics in marketing. However, often the question remains if these results can be reproduced in another experimental setting. In this article, we use the work from (Sahni et al., Marketing Science 37:236–258, 2018) to test this thesis. In their paper, (Sahni et al., Marketing Science 37:236–258, 2018) show that adding the first name of the recipient to the subject line of an email increases the performance of email campaigns. But in the last years, this marketing trick has become a common practice in email marketing, and therefore, it might be that the behavior of recipients changed as they got used to it. In our empirical research, we find no indication that using the first name of the recipient in the subject line has a positive effect on opening rates or click-through rates; as such we are not able to reproduce the findings from (Sahni et al., Marketing Science 37:236–258, 2018). However, we do find that using the surname of the recipient has a positive effect on opening rates and click-through rates; an indication that similar marketing techniques still have potential, but that they need to be more creative and surprising.