Email subject A/B test

Email Subject Line Test: Which Otherwise Identical Message Got More Clicks (Not Opens) – Dash vs. Colon?

VERSION A	VS.	VERSION B

via whichtestwon.com

Very nice experiment.

My gut told me version A is a better winner, as dash works as "call for action". And I was sorta right.

Version A made it by almost 15% over the version B in clicks, however, version B received more open by more than 12%. I don't have a good explanation for that, but that's an interesting thing to come by.

# Posted via web from opportunity__cost

First steps to effective time management

This is important to manage your time effectively, right?

For me, as for the highly addicted to emails person, I found it very important to optimize my time for emailing back and forth. Truth to be told, I never managed to use the "silent hours", when no email is accessed. I'm pretty connected all the time (except for some very rare occasions) so dropping this communication channel intentionally never sounded like a good plan for me.

However, within the time, I feel that this distracts me more and more. So I decided to review my emailing habits and find out if there is any reasonable time limits that I can incorporate into my daily schedule. What is more important, I was looking for a good excuse for setting a strict hours with absolutely no email access.

So the research comes first. I've started with a quick Ruby script to retrieve the date & time of messages in my Sent mailbox.

Here is the direct link to it: http://pastie.org/757482

This script gives me the CSV form of hour of the day and emails sent during this hour. I don't have a huge number of emails on with my current Gmail account, so it did work well for me in the way it is.

The next step is building a visual representation of these numbers. This is how it looks like for me:

Here is the direct link to it: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Akgp9DFPJgs7dGlCQlVfMEpieXFnVE9vZ1FWYjV3QWc&hl=en

Well, what can I say now. This creates a potentially different issue for me.

This chart does not look very disordered to me. But it looks busy. I feel that I can squeeze two-three hours into one. This sounds like a good idea, because the most of these things are unlikely to be important to get an answer the same minute or even hour. Say, a slack of two-three hours might be okay. Keeping in mind that they most of my contacts have my emergency contact.

However, I still feel like this is something I might want to do gradually. By cutting one piece at a time. And probably I'll be starting with the very early and very late hours first.

# Posted via email from opportunity__cost

What I hate

It's when I click on unsubscribe link at the bottom of some email message and opens up a Web page asking me to type my email address there. What the fuck? Didn't you just send me this email? Don't you know my email address?

Well, I'm talking about legal email advertisements here. They are not supposed to be delivered to you whatever it takes, crashing everything on the way. I had willfully opt-in for them and now I want to opt-out. So please, tell me, why are you trashing my experience working with you by giving me a feeling of a nasty SPAM-machine? It is wrong.

Guys, whenever you build something, keep in mind that the truth in simplicity. Nobody wants to do your job. Make the user experience one-click. And when it happens, trust me, he'll want to click once more.