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Posted by angelacherry

[Estimated read time: 7 minutes]

Much has happened since we last posted about what Twitter can teach us about the US presidential candidates. In the past three weeks, an additional 15 states have participated in electoral contests to help narrow the field of candidates who will ultimately secure the Republican and Democratic party nominations for president.

With so much activity happening offline, we were due for an update of the latest and greatest activity happening online on our beloved Twitter! As with our previous post, we’re putting our Twitter analytics tool, Followerwonk, to work analyzing the top presidential candidates. This includes tracking changes in followership, analyzing conversations and engagement, and other interesting insights we uncover on this journey. You can also follow the data we’re tracking for the current five top-performing candidates* in realtime by visiting their individual Followerwonk analysis report pages:

• Hillary Clinton
• Ted Cruz
• Marco Rubio
• Bernie Sanders
• Donald Trump

*Top-performing candidates as measured by their finishing positions in the most recent electoral contests. This list will evolve with the election cycle.

What’s happened since we last checked in?

In our first post, we examined Twitter trends around the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary. Since then, Nevada and South Carolina hosted contests in the second half of February, and most notably, yesterday was the BIG ONE: Super Tuesday.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Super Tuesday, it marks the single biggest day for casting ballots in the 2016 US presidential race until the general election in November. Voters in 12 states cast ballots with a significant number of delegates at stake: 595 for Republicans across 11 contests, and 865 for Democrats across 12 contests.

Now that we’re all caught up, let’s dig in!

Cloudy with a chance of Trump

We wanted to know what the Twitterverse had to say about the candidates during the electoral contests in Nevada and South Carolina. To capture this, we created a series of word clouds representing the most common words associated with tweets and retweets mentioning each candidate during the 48 hours surrounding the contests.

You’ll see that each candidate’s word cloud contains popular words and slogans from their respective campaigns, such as:

• “cruzcrew” for Cruz
• “marcomentum” for Rubio
• “makeamericagreatagain” for Trump
• “imwithher” for Clinton
• “feelthebern” for Sanders

Perhaps most interesting, however, is the one word surfacing in every single word cloud: “Trump.” And while it makes an appearance in each of the five candidate’s word clouds, it’s especially significant in those of his GOP rivals.

Word clouds for the top 5 candidates during the Nevada Caucus.

Word clouds for the top 5 candidates during the South Carolina primary.

What’s in a name?

Given Trump’s broad name recognition, his prevalence may not seem surprising. That is, until you consider that according to a recent Gallup survey, there is one candidate with slightly higher name recognition (Clinton) who did not achieve the same distinction. In addition, the most recent measurement of media coverage per candidate conducted by the FiveThirtyEight blog uncovered that while Trump received 54 percent of the GOP primary media coverage, Clinton received 77 percent of the Democratic primary media coverage.

Furthermore, at this stage in the primaries, both Trump and Clinton are considered the front-runners to win their party’s nominations, according to the latest news analysis from the Chicago Tribune and ABC News, among others.

So what gives?

If we had to speculate about the reason Trump is so prominent across the candidate word clouds — and to be clear, we are speculating — it’s likely the same reason he’s so prominent in our current political discourse: the American public is fascinated by his meteoric rise as a politician. It’s expected that someone like Clinton, who has built a long political career, would hit these milestones, but perhaps unexpected that a businessman and reality TV star would do the same. Twitter is ultimately reflection of the world around it, after all.

Tweeting up a storm

As we did with the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primary, we explored which states’ residents were actively tweeting during the 48-hour period surrounding the most recent electoral contests.

Once again, residents of the US capital, Washington, DC, swept the top spot across all contests.

We also found that Nevadans were highly engaged, ranking in the top 10 states tweeting about each candidate across both the Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primaries.

The top states tweeting during the Nevada and South Carolina contests in February also offered a glimpse of the anticipation felt in a few Super Tuesday states. Most notably was Alaska, which took a top 10 spot for 70% of the pre-Super Tuesday candidate cards, as well as Texas and Vermont, which took top 10 spots on 40% of the pre-Super Tuesday candidate cards. And not wanting to be left out of the ongoing Twitter discussion, New Hampshire residents remained active in the two electoral contests that followed their own, with that state taking a top 10 spot on 60% of the pre-Super Tuesday candidate cards.

Top states tweeting about the top 5 candidates during the Nevada caucus.

Top states tweeting about the top 5 candidates during the South Carolina primary.

An examination of the most active states tweeting on Super Tuesday reveals a few interesting findings, particularly for the geolocation of people tweeting about Clinton. For instance, despite winning the Minnesota caucus, Minnesota does not appear in Sanders’s top 10 Super Tuesday rankings, but it does appear on Clinton’s list. In addition, despite sweeping the primary contests in the South, no southern state ranked on Clinton’s top 10 list. On top of that, Clinton is the only one of the five candidates to not have her home state (Arkansas) rank in her top 10 list, whereas the other candidates had their respective home states make appearances in their top 10 lists. It’s worth noting though that New York, a state for which she served as senator, does appear on Clinton’s list.

Top states tweeting about the top 5 candidates during Super Tuesday.

Who’s winning the follower race?

We know which states are doing the most tweeting, but what about which candidate is winning the race for followers? It depends on how you look at it.

If you look at sheer quantity of followers, the rankings are as follows:

1. Trump: 6 million+ followers
2. Clinton: 5.3 million+ followers
3. Sanders: 1.3 million+ followers
4. Rubio: 1.1 million+ followers
5. Cruz: 782,000+ followers

Number of Trump followers as of February 29, 2016

However, if you look at net gains in followers over the past several weeks, it’s a different picture.* We decided to take this view because it takes into account the fact that some of the candidates were much more well-known prior to announcing their candidacy. We began tracking each of the candidates on Twitter on January 14, 2016, a couple of weeks prior to the Iowa Caucus. If you look at the percentage gain in net followers since mid-January, the ranking shifts to:

1. Sanders: 34.29 percent (gain of about 391,000 followers)
2. Cruz: 21.78 percent (gain of about 154,700 followers)
3. Rubio: 19.16 percent (gain of about 203,000 followers)
4. Trump: 14.55 percent (gain of about 826,000 followers)
5. Clinton: 7.99 percent (gain of about 408,700 followers)

Net gain of followers for Sanders since mid-January, as of February 29, 2016.

*Wondering what’s up with the flat line on February 21? It represents one in only a small handful of times where our social graph fetching hit a snag and failed to accurately capture the total number of followers that day. We’re bummed it happened, but rest assured it was fixed by February 22.

Shifting winds impacting followership

It’s also fun to drill down into certain moments in time to understand how changes in followership fluctuate throughout the campaign cycle.

For example, the GOP debate on February 25, 2016 marked a major shift in tone from Rubio toward Trump. Much of the news analysis the following day, including this piece from the The Hill and this one from CNN, noted that Rubio was far more critical of Trump than he’s been in previous debates. Sure enough, if you look at trends in followership for Rubio, apart from the dates of electoral contests, he experienced his biggest spike within the 24-hour period surrounding that debate, gaining about 15,000 new followers.

Change in followership for Rubio from January 31–February 29, 2016

Not to be outdone, the very next day on February 26, 2016, Trump experienced a decent bump himself, collecting about 44,000 new followers on the day Governor Chris Christie endorsed him for the presidency.

Until next time…

Keep checking back in with the Moz Blog and Followerwonk on Twitter between now and the general election in November, where we’ll keep you posted on our latest analysis and findings of all things presidential on Twitter.

We’d also love to hear from you in the comments if you have any insights to share from issues or candidates you track on Twitter, or areas you’d like to see us explore in future posts. Don’t be shy!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Isla_McKetta

[Estimated read time: 15 minutes]

Like most of you, I get a lot of email. Here’s a look at all the marketing emails I received in my personal email in one 24-hour period:

That’s not even counting the transactional shipping confirmations and informational blog post notifications. Or all the work-related newsletters I have sent to my address at Moz.

I do not open most of this email. In fact, preparing for this blog post, I’ve had a really fun time shunting it off into a folder called “content examples.” But receiving so much email is an excellent opportunity to think about what motivates me to open and email, what doesn’t, and what really annoys me. It’s also given me the chance to think about the various types of email subject lines and how we could all be using them better.

So how do you, as a savvy email marketer, stand out in your customer’s amazingly crowded inbox? I’m here to help you do just that. First we’ll briefly cover the different types of email. Then we’ll talk subject lines and take a close look at how two very different companies — Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh and Moz — compose subject lines and what you can learn from both.

Types of email

Before we get into subject lines, it’s important to do a brief overview of the different types of emails, because different types of email require different things from a subject line.

Informational

Informational emails are educational. This doesn’t mean that they have a lesson plan attached, but it does mean that they’re geared to tell a reader something they didn’t already know. Change the logo on your mobile app? Send an informational email. Publish a new blog post? Send an informational email. Updating a user on how many airline miles they have or that a new report is ready? You get the idea.

These emails are (ostensibly) all about what the recipient needs and they (often) fall near the top of the marketing funnel. Here are some examples of informational emails I’ve received recently:

The newsletter

This particular newsletter tells me all the things I need to know about what’s happening in the publishing industry. They have the unsexiest subject lines ever, but their content is valuable enough that I open the email anyway.

Another favorite newsletter is the Moz Top 10. More on that later.

The blog post

Yay! A new blog post! There are other ways to receive updates about new blog posts, but some of us are old fashioned and we are talking email here.

The informational update

What has the Park Service been up to in this, their centennial year? I’m so glad you asked. There’s an email for that.

The report

I signed up to get the latest nonprofit jobs in Seattle emailed to me sometime around the time I graduated college. In 2001. Dear Idealist keeps on sending me that report. Every day. That’s a lot of emails, but they must be doing a good job because I haven’t unsubscribed yet.

Informational emails are strictly for the reader’s benefit and as such, you can often get away with less enticing subject lines and still preserve your open rate. Although it might also be tempting to loop news about your latest sale or promotion into the “Informational” category, those emails are actually asking the reader to do something, so they fall under the next category…

Sale or offer

If your personal inbox looks anything like mine, sale or offer emails are what most marketers are good at. It’s also where we marketers look for our conversions, so it’s really, really important for us that people open sales emails. Here’s a sample of the sales emails in my inbox:

Did you spot the red herring? That email from Amazon, while containing an offer, is also a triggered email. Amazon is really good at triggered emails. More on that below.

Transactional or triggered

According to MailChimp, transactional email is “email sent to an individual based on some action.” That could be anything from a new customer welcome email to a drip campaign a reader signs up for.

In the case of Amazon, I was looking at that steam cleaner and added it to my cart as I consider it. Actually, I added it to my cart to see if they’d add it to my daily deals (because they are just that good at tracking). No luck yet, but I’m patient.

Here are some other triggered emails from my inbox:

The order confirmation

The pending invite

The drip campaign

Most transactional and triggered emails are also emails that your reader is looking out for, so we’re not going to worry as much about their subject lines. As long as you’re being clear, you’re probably fine.

Types of email subject lines

Now that you have a really good handle on the types of email you can send, it’s time to think of the style of selling that particular email. Keep in mind that although we marketers like things to align in predictable categories, some of the best email subject lines often fall into more than one of the following categories (ooh! cross-genre subject lines!).

Direct

Make no bones about it, we have a deal for you. That deal is…

The direct, straightforward, unadorned subject line works for a company like Wolferman’s which prides itself on quality baked goods. If the information or deal is interesting enough, it appeals to a wide range of people and will never offend anyone.

Playful

Make someone laugh and they’ll remember you. Or at least they won’t delete your email outright. The only thing that would have made me like this email from Shutterfly more is if there was a big ol’ kiss emoji after “Mr. President.”

I’m also really a fan of this subject line from the Bernie Sanders campaign:

Notice that both of the playful subject lines here use pop culture references? That’s not a necessity (and can be dangerous if you’re too oblique), but these references can be a great way to tap into a reader’s memory and call upon all the images that your referent conjures.

Curiosity-inducing

I’ve ranted before about how people misuse the curiosity gap in their titles. But don’t underestimate the power of curiosity to get people to open emails. If you pique just the right amount, you’re in. This subject line is specific enough and yet open enough to make me want to click:

This one is not:

Personalized

Personalizing an email doesn’t just have to mean using someone’s name. Kissmetrics nails it when they say you can use location, time, personas, and more to make your reader feel like the email is just for them. Travelocity is famous for pulling together fabulous emails based on what you’re browsing and what trips you’ve purchased. I’d show you one, but they sent me this email:

And I think I over-opted-out. As discussed above, Amazon is another personalization rock star. They’ll send you triggered emails tailored to items you’ve browsed, items you’ve bought, items related to items you’ve bought — and it’s all right there in the subject line. However, personalization can go wrong if you’re acting on bad information.

No, I did not give Classmates my correct name when I registered over a decade ago. As a result, their personalization doesn’t pull hard at my subconscious. Instead, it gives me a good giggle.

Scarcity

Humans are hardwired to respond to scarce resources. Whether that means “There are only a few tickets left!” or “This offer expires in four hours!”, letting your email recipients know that something is limited can be a good way to get them to take action.

Call to action

Most frequently used by political parties (or so it seems right now), the call to action (CTA) subject line literally calls the recipient to take an action.

The “RE:” here is extraneous and annoying, but the CTA here works. I get a lot of similar emails that tell me to contact my senator or sign a petition.

The CTA-type subject line also works for marketers.

This email from Rejuvenation is a reminder, a call to action, and (if you read down the line far enough) an offer as well. You could invite your subscribers to “Come into the store for a special discount” or the classic “Tell us how we’re doing.” Both are calls to action.

A note on formatting subject lines

Whatever type of subject line you’re using, there are various things you can do within the text to make it stand out. You can use all caps:

Or add in some symbols:

Different audiences respond to different things, but to my mind both of these come off as gimmicky. I notice them but they almost never compel me to open that email. And when my local art museum started using them I died a little inside.

You can make your subject line extra long:

Or extra short:

Just remember that if your customer is reading your email on mobile (which 65% of people do), they can likely only see the first 50 characters of whatever you write. So I hope L.L. Bean wasn’t telling me there were 70 free shirts available, because I’ll never know.

How Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh uses email and email subject lines

As a new mom who does most of my shopping online, I get a lot of email from Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh.

Sometimes I get several per day.

Which makes Carter’s/OshKosh B’Gosh an easy case study for us to put all our email subject line knowledge to use.

Carter’s mostly uses the sale/offer type of email (except when I order something), so we’ll focus on those types of emails (plus, then I don’t have to show you how many times I’ve ordered from this company in the same time span). I received 25 emails from Carter’s or OshKosh in one 10-day stretch:

How I respond

First of all, that’s a lot of email. Granted, they are writing to an audience (me!) who isn’t getting a lot of sleep, and, as a result, has no short-term memory. But it is a little smothering, and I sometimes run a little animated clip through my brain of the Carter’s email team doing battle with the OshKosh team over who can send the most email the fastest. It isn’t pretty and invariably I lose.

We can chat about whether this volume of emails is effective; I did, after all, admit (just a few paragraphs ago) to a large number of purchases. But that’s more because I’m caught up in their rewards cycle and because at the end of a day full of marketing and mothering, online shopping is all I have the energy for. I might have a problem ;).

Really, though, I’d say this is too much email and I have since “managed my email preferences.”

What they could do better

Mix it up

Of those 25 emails, 16 used the direct approach. That’s a lot for a retailer, especially one sending this much email. Here’s a look at what other tactics they used:

Carter’s and OshKosh clearly have a handle on how to motivate people with deals and by time-limiting those deals. But I’d love to see them try to do more with playful subject lines. To be fair, after creating the above graphic, I received the following email:

It’s a step in the right direction?

Remember that it’s important to keep your customers engaged. Using a wider variety of subject line types and testing new territory can be a great way to do that.

Personalize

All-caps aside, this subject line would have been terrific:

If I had a girl. Carter’s has enough information about my browsing and purchase history by now to know that I have a son. They might be confused about his age because I’ve been stockpiling outfits for when he grows, but he is a boy. And no matter how gender neutral I try to be, I’m probably not going to outfit my son in dresses anytime soon.

The lesson: We’re digital marketers. We have A LOT of data on our customers. If you aren’t already using that data to customize your email marketing, impress your boss by asking how to start.

Don’t cry wolf

OMG I’m so sad I missed the 50% off sale this weekend. Wait, today everythings’s 60% off?

Promotions are awesome. They get your customers’ attention. The move old inventory. They increase your bottom line. And time-limited promotions are a very good way to tie into that fear of missing out that makes scarcity subject lines so effective.

But when I’ve been a customer for less than half a year and I already know the sale gets better and better and better the longer I wait, you’ve lost all the power that scarcity offers. Instead, I feel duped if I bought at the higher price and fail to be motivated by email subject lines that mostly tout the latest deal.

Be strategic about the strings you’re pulling with your subject lines. They’re a lot more effective that way.

Am I being unfair to Carter’s and OshKosh? Maybe. I’m sure that they have thoroughly tested their subject lines and related open and clickthrough rates. And let’s face it, creating emails at that volume while trying to maintain freshness is hard. Either way, there are some good lessons to be learned here (or in your reactions to your own inbox).

How we use subject lines for the Moz Top 10

Now let’s take a look at how well I’m doing in writing subject lines for the Moz Top 10.

The Moz Top 10 is a newsletter, so we’re obviously going to take a slightly different tack than your average retailer (at least at the sales level — don’t underestimate the power of a strong newsletter for your top-of-funnel content marketing), but there is still some insight to be gained from what works and what doesn’t. To understand the difference, I analyzed a year’s worth of editions.

If you’re counting, we split test five different subject lines (each going to an initial run of about 15,000 readers) for each bi-weekly edition. That’s about 130 different subject lines. I’ve split out some of the most instructive weeks below.

Note: This is not a controlled experiment. Things other than tone change from subject line to subject line in a given week, and if you try to compare open rates from one week to another, you’ll be lost (bonus points if you can pick out the edition where everyone was on vacation).

March 24, 2015: Curiosity and personalization work

This chart is representative of the most common trend across Moz Top 10 subject lines: piquing a reader’s curiosity and personalizing the subject line by using the word “you” are winning tactics with this audience.

What I could do better: I’d love to personalize the email further, but we just don’t have that kind of data on this list. And I’m going to want to remember to avoid subject lines that sound formulaic.

February 10, 2015: Just the facts

It’s not surprising that a direct headline works well for a newsletter like the Moz Top 10. In this case, the top two subject lines were directly worded. What is surprising, though, is that personalizing the subject line a little (adding “you”) actually caused the open rate to drop. This is something that bears more testing.

Lesson learned: Assumptions are not always right. Test, test, test.

August 19, 2014: Scarcity for the loss

This newsletter will expire in 10 minutes. Seriously, we don’t use scarcity much in Moz Top 10 subject lines. The chart below illustrates why. If you think we should, I’d love it if you shared your ideas in the comments on how to effectively do that.

Fewer than 15% of people opened the “scarcity” edition. That’s a poor open rate even for a week when everyone was clearly out of the office.

The takeaway: Write for your audience. In this case, I think marketers are so used to hearing “the latest” that it’s lost its power.

July 8, 2014: Sometimes clickbait wins

Did I hate myself a little for writing the winning subject line here? You bet. Did it cause a little controversy around the office? Absolutely. Did it work? Unfortunately, yes.

My trick when writing clickbaity titles is to be honest while you’re being playful. This was the week Google ditched author photos and started selling domains, so the subject line is strictly correct. It can also be misconstrued and I counted on our readers here to take this as playful rather than misleading. Their clicks said they wanted to read and our unsubscribes didn’t jump, so I think I skated through on this one.

What we could do better

There’s a lot to learn when writing subject lines. Based on the above data, I’m going to keep trying a few tactics at once. I’ll definitely try to keep up the playful tone and personalize when appropriate. I may never use a scarcity-based subject line again, and will always strive to pique the readers’ curiosity and interest without being misleading. In the long run, isn’t that what it’s all about?

Want to see how well I learn from this deep dive into email subject lines?

Sign up for the Moz Top 10.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!