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As an industry, we can learn a lot from the mistakes of our peers. That's the spirit in which I publish the Oopsy Hall of Fame each year. This year's inductees demonstrated several weak points in our collective email processes:
Subject lines aren't making the best impressions. While there are thankfully few catastrophic subject line errors -- like Harry & David's "Postcard Optin" subject line -- there were plenty of subject lines with missing words, missing hyphenation and misused apostrophes. According to a 2007 Forrester Research study, 35% of subscribers open an email because of what's in the subject line, so making sure that yours is error-free is critical.
Considering the problems that retailers had with their subject lines, I was delightfully surprised to see that they had fairly clean preheader messages, especially considering that the concept is still relatively new. Perhaps the newness made marketers pay more attention to this email element, resulting in fewer mistakes...
