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We've seen in email tests that subject lines can have implications far beyond the open rate. We've seen two identical emails with identical landing pages have the same open rates and the same click-through rates (CTR), but one generated more sales than the other.

What's the difference? The subject line.

In short, subject lines are important.

And they are difficult to write.

This infographic does a great job of boiling things down to help remove the indecision when you are writing subject lines.

Your conversion rate is affected by a series of "micro-conversions", and this is especially true of email. To get your emails to convert, you must get the recipient to open it, and three components affect open rates: Who it is fromThe Subject LineThe first lines of text, which are shown by many email clientsThis article focuses on subject lines that work for those of us offering training and education. These may have more limited success with other audiences. It is interesting nonetheless.

@unbounce - Writing headlines and subject lines and tweets all have something in common: You have a limited number of characters to get a prospect's attention in a very noisy environment.

Steve Young gives us some tested subject lines to consider in our campaigns.

Have some fun with your subject lines and don't take yourself too seriously!

Great little checklist for Subject Line development.

 @crestodina I spoke at the Conversion Conference #convcon this week about flipping your message according to your Web visitor. This can be applied to subject lines, search ads, display ads and landing pages.

One of the most powerful "flips" is between the four kind of visitors outlined by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg in their book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?.

Here is a creative twist on the four kinds of visitors you'll encounter on your website: video game characters.

Is the page, post or email you're working on right now targeting Frogger or Mario or Galaga or PacMan?

It should.

While we don't recommend sending cold emails to prospect I found these tips somewhat fascinating especially:A picture is worth a thousand wordsRecipients who opened your first are more likely respond subsequent emailsAdd link website in the lineSome of might work for subscribers as well.

Here's the first line from this very helpful little post. "0 sales! What? But we got 517 unique visitors this week!" Airing your mistakes is not seen as smart marketing in many circles, but this kind of thing really is helpful. Besides the important moral of this story, there's another:

Failing the right way leads to success faster. Failing without knowing why invites unnecessary failure.

I predict good things for these folks.

@thisissethsblog I shared this for just one line:

"But where's the person in charge of Magic?" Even though we use science to get more revenue from a website, there is always a sense of magic. Things never work out the way we think. Surprises are the rule, not the exception.

Ultimately, we are using science to find the delightful, the remarkable and the relevant in your website.

That's what your visitors are looking for, too.

Landing pages are your friend, and here are seven tools that will make your pages very friendly to your bottom line. OMI is also teasing my new Conversion Crash Course. Check it out.

While we never do tests to achieve social virality, I think we can learn something from how people interact with images on social networks.

Don't take the results of this report as meaning that you should make the images on your website animated or vertical or eliminated. You may find the exact opposite for more engaged audiences.

Instead, add this bit of information to your knowledge base when testing social campaigns. You may want to test image orientation, brightness or animation.

But always test to the bottom line.

 @richpage offers up 25 things you can do to impact your conversion rate. Not all of these are really "free" when you consider the cost of time and effort. None of them require sending money to an ad network or Google or an agency.

My favorites are: #7 State your value proposition clearly #8 Create landing pages for your PPC ads #13 Run an A/B test for the subjet line of your next email #18 Improve your webpage load time #22 Discover what your visitors are really doing using CrazyEgg

We've had the privilege of working with several colleges to optimize their websites. The lessons laid out in this article cannot be overstated. According to SpyFu.com, of 5,050 websites in the "University" and "College" industries who spend more than $5000 per month on search ads, only 275 have split testing software installed. However, 4,208 have some form of web analytics software installed.

The bottom line is that those universities who are involved in testing their sites are going to win more top students to graduate and undergraduate programs.

"Many private universities spend upward of $2,000 to recruit each student who enrolls." A little optimization will go a long way.

 @bennyblum We don't champion conversion for the fun of it, although it is fun. We do it because it makes us money on the bottom line and gives us leverage when finding more traffic.

Marketing Land's Benny Blum lays out the things you should do to find this leverage for your online advertising, SEO and PPC. Determine: What's a visit worth? Design for Conversion Get Your Message Right Establish an Organic Strategy

Whenever someone writes an article about Conversion Consultants (like us), we are always nervous that we might cross some of these lines.

We know that we have made these mistakes in the past.

The issue is exacerbated when the author is someone like Amy Africa, who has the experience and likes to tell things like they are. Her middle name could be "Frank".

I'm happy to report that we have evolved beyond these "lies" and firmly embrace the matching truths.

If you are looking for someone to guide your optimization efforts, have a conversion with a Conversion Scientist.

How patient are you when surfing the Web? According to recent studies, you're not as patient as you might think. Slow loading pages will impact your conversion rates, and probably affect the ranking of your pages on the major search engines as well.