By Maverick Steffen | Daily Marketing Advice

It is very important to continually be measuring which subject line generates the highest open rate to all of your various email marketing lists.

After all, the point of email marketing begins with getting people to open the actual email.

The bottom line is if your subject line isn't getting at least a 20% open rate, you need a better subject line!

So, whenever you send emails to your email marketing lists, you want to ensure you're sending 2 total emails with 2 different and distinct subject lines.

You can easily do this by splitting the list you wish to market to in half.

For example:

An accountant has an email list of 5,000 landscaping companies, nationwide.

He will send the same email to the entire list, but will split the list in half to ensure one half gets one subject line, and the other half gets the other subject line.

Subject Line A: Use this Process to Maximize Profit

Subject Line B: Good morning, [First Name of Recipient]

After each campaign was launched on the same day and at the same time, Subject Line A generated an 18% open rate, while Subject Line B generated a 32% open rate. This same test was used again the following week to people that did not open the original email, and the results were relatively the same.

This accountant is now armed with great market intelligence as to the best possible subject line to use to drive the highest open rate open rate. Next he'll experiment with body content.