Saw our press release open rate go from 12% to 41% in 3 months, and it wasn't the subject lines
We used to blast our monthly release to a list of 8,000 contacts and got about 12% opens. Back in March we split it into four lists by industry and started sending each one a version with a different first paragraph. By June the opens were at 41%, and reply rates went from almost nothing to 3 or 4 per send. The subject lines barely changed, so I think it was the list cleanup and the first line doing the work. Has anyone else tried splitting by industry like this, or did you find something else moved the needle more?