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Is there anything e-mail related that spammers can't ruin? First they killed graphics; Internet service providers block them. Now they've apparently wrecked personalized subject lines.

While e-mails with personalized messages achieve high clickthrough rates, those with personalized subject lines do not, according to MailerMailer's e-mail marketing metrics report for the second half of 2007. Moreover, nonpersonalizede-mails outperform those with subject line-only customization.

Messages with personalized body copy pulled an average clickthrough rate of 4.54%, the e-mail list management firm noted. This is a fairly significant increase from the first half of 2007, when custom e-mail messages typically got 3.15% clickthroughs.

Meanwhile, the clickthrough rate for e-mails with both personalized copy and subject lines was less than half that — just 1.85% — in the second half of the year. MailerMailer did not report this statistic for the first six months of '07.

E-mail messages that weren't personalized at all scored an average clickthrough of 2.66%. And most striking, those with just subject lines personalized got the lowest clickthrough, just 1.68%. That's down a sizable 3.34% from the first half; then, e-mails with tailored subject lines hit 5.02%.

The problem? Spammers.

“What happens to any successful tactic? Spammers jump on it and ruin it for the rest of us,” says Stefan Pollard, director of e-mail marketing best practices for Lyris HQ. “If you go into your junk folder, you'll see your own name all over the place.”

Pollard says spammers also use random names in “from” lines to try to fool people into opening their garbage.

“Those two tactics have really hurt. That's why I always say it's more important to focus on the sender rather than the recipient [in subject lines]. I know my name. Your ability to merge it into a mailing doesn't really impress me. I advise clients to brand their ‘from’ lines.”

Indeed, as reported by Return Path last year, 55.9% of respondents indicated that when it comes to deciding whether to open an e-mail, knowing and trusting the sender is a primary consideration. It's hard to believe this metric has dropped.

The custom subject line is yet another in a string of approaches spammers have caused problems with. Early on they abused common direct marketing sales words and phrases, such as “free,” “50% off” and “act now.” As a result, this language began to trigger spam filters.

Spammers ruined e-mail marketers' ability to use images, too. “Image blocking by ISPs is a direct result of spammers using images to promote their products,” Pollard says.

Not so surprisingly, MailerMailer found that average unique open rates have continued to slide as people receive more messages on handheld devices and through ISPs with images automatically turned off.

The average unique open rate — “unique” because people opened the same message twice but were only counted once — for the second half of 2007 was 13.98%, compared with 16.11% for the first six months of that year.

Banking and finance e-mails in the second half pulled average open rates of 28.84%, the highest of 21 industries MailerMailer tracked. Another high achiever was religious and spiritual e-mail (26.76%). These two categories were the only ones whose open rates actually increased from the first to the second half of last year.

Medical, dental and healthcare e-mail managed just 6.64%, the lowest of all the categories and less than half the 13.72% average the category achieved in the first half, according to MailerMailer.

Marketing and advertising e-mails' open rate was 13.33%, putting them in the bottom third of the study.

MailerMailer again attributed the overall decline in e-mail open rates to the growing number of people opening messages on handheld devices, which automatically disable graphics. Also, to protect subscribers from spam, viruses and unwanted images such as pornography, many ISPs have been turning images off.

RoadRunner is the latest large ISP to do this, following AOL, Hotmail and Yahoo's lead.

An open is recorded when the receiving computer calls for graphics from the sending machine; hence, no graphics, no open.

Click rates by personalizationJuly-December 2007

Not personalized	2.66%
Subject line personalized	1.68%
Message personalized	4.54%
Both subject line and message personalized	1.85%
Source: MailerMailer