About those Obama campaign e-mail subject lines →

The Obama campaign’s crack marketing staff routinely failed to predict which e-mail subject line would work best:

Writers, analysts, and managers routinely bet on which lines would perform best and worst. “We were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing,” says Showalter. “Every time something really ugly won, it would shock me: giant-size fonts for links, plain-text links vs. pretty ‘Donate’ buttons. Eventually we got to thinking, ‘How could we make things even less attractive?’ That’s how we arrived at the ugly yellow highlighting on the sections we wanted to draw people’s eye to.”

Their success was in their ability to find out what works, not their ability to get it right the first time.

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