In my research, I studied whether ALL CAPS in subject lines were more or less likely to increase open rates. The findings were a bit of a surprise.
The first thing to recognize about ALL CAPS in marketing is that they are EVERYWHERE. Just take a glance at the closest piece of marketing to you right now. I’m one million percent sure that it will have some text in ALL CAPS. Why is that?
Marketers need to attract attention and they need to create a sense of urgency with their texts. Using ALL CAPS is a great way to do this. But writing in this way is so ubiquitous that it seems unremarkable in marketing. Compare this to newspaper text, which almost never uses ALL CAPS (in the articles at least).
Compare it also to how ALL CAPS is used in social media posts. When someone wants to emphasize something, THEY WRITE IT LIKE THIS. It has been criticized for being a way of YELLING ON THE INTERNET. But marketers certainly don’t want to yell at their potential customers, so something else is going on.
In email subject lines, there are very few ways that you can draw attention to a word or phrase. You can’t use a background color, you can’t resize the text or use a fancy font, and you can’t even make a text bold. So using ALL CAPS is one of the only ways that email marketers can emphasize their text. Take another look at that same marketing text as earlier. I bet there’s some other textual modifications besides ALL CAPS, isn’t there? Something that you can’t do in a subject line.
Now here comes the surprising part: writing in ALL CAPS does NOT get more people to open an email. I studied 33,000+ email subject lines and compared the open rates of those with ALL CAPS to those without. I found that using ALL CAPS actually has a statistically significant negative effect on open rates (see the figure below). In fact, in my data, using ALL CAPS in a subject line led to a reduction in open rate by 3.32%. That might not sound like a lot, but if you’re sending out thousands of emails, it means missing out on many, many more people seeing your emails.
I’ll discuss other factors around ALL CAPS in email marketing texts in a later post. But for now, the point is to be very careful in how and when you use ALL CAPS in a subject line.
And remember that I’m talking big picture here – I’m looking at a lot of emails from a lot of different companies – so your results may vary. Obviously, it’s a very good idea to know your audience and know what they will respond to. And it’s a good idea to AB test your subject lines.
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