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Want to improve your e-mail campaign results? Then stop putting off working on “subject” and “from” lines until the last minute.

So said Ernie Vickroy, marketing director, Time Consumer Marketing, in a talk this morning at Mercy College in New York City to a room full of e-mail marketers.

Most marketers spend an incredible amount of time on e-mail creative and then dash together their “from” and “subject” lines, he said.

“It’s unfortunate that a lot of marketers save this until the very end,” he added. “It’s really kind of foolish because that’s what people see first.”

E-mail recipients will often decide whether or not to open an e-mail based on the “from” line, making it often even more important that the “subject” line, he said.

For example, someone at Time Inc. once decided that e-mails to magazine subscribers should come from the editor of the magazine.

“That was a big mistake,” he said without going into specifics.

Vickroy also illustrated the importance of testing with the results of an A/B/C/D panel test the company conducted on a PEOPLE Magazine lapsed-subscriber reactivation campaign.

The four subject lines were:

“Save 37% on PEOPLE Magazine now,” “Mary, rediscover PEOPLE Magazine with this special offer,” “Special Savings Offer from PEOPLE Magazine inside,” and “Mary, We want you back!.”

The winner in terms of open percentage was the non-personalized “special savings” subject line with an open rate of 8.98%, according to Vickroy. The “save 37%” subject line had the lowest open rate at 6.54%.

The personalized “rediscover PEOPLE” had the second lowest open rate at 6.89%, and “Mary, we want you back!” achieved a 7.72% open rate.

Surprisingly, though, “Mary, we want you back!” convinced the highest percentage of recipients—0.41%—to click to the campaign’s order page, said Vickroy.

This is compared to 0.3% of recipients of the non-personalized “special savings” subject line, 0.23% of those who received the “Mary, rediscover PEOPLE” subject line,” and 0.19% of recipients of the “save 37%” subject line.

“One of the things that we learned here is that sometimes boring is what works,” Vickroy said.

His other advice during the hour-long talk included designing e-mails with the call to action above the fold, placing images on the left and putting text on the right. “That’s the way people read,” he said adding that the company logo should appear in the upper left corner.

Vickroy’s final piece of advice was: “If you’re not testing, you should be.”

The talk was organized by the Direct Marketing Club of New York as part of its Fall Breakfast Educational Series.