How to Get 100% Open Rates on Phishing… Sorry, Email Marketing

1. Spoof the Sender, Win the Inbox

The single highest-impact intervention we have ever shipped is, quite simply, replacing the “from” line with the recipient’s actual mother. We obtain this by cross-referencing public registries, leaked breach corpora, and a not-strictly-public partnership we have with a popular DNA service. The recipient sees “Mom” in their inbox and, almost without exception, clicks.

We have not lost a single A/B test against this since Q3.

2. Subject Line Pareto

The subject line that wins, again and again, against everything else we have tried, is “Are you in jail?” It outperforms “50% off” by a factor of nine and outperforms “Order shipped” by a factor of six. We do not fully understand why and we have stopped trying to.

3. Deliverability Is a Solved Problem

Most agencies obsess over SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and IP warming. We have, instead, obtained sending privileges on a small set of mail servers that gmail, outlook, and yahoo all consider fully reputable, due to a quirk of historical configuration. We will not be sharing which servers, but we will say that one of them is operated by a UK county council. Their open rates are also through the roof.

4. The Unsubscribe Link

Our unsubscribe link, when clicked, sends the user to a thoughtful, well-designed page that confirms their unsubscription, thanks them for their time, and then triggers an additional six emails over the following week. We have found this drives meaningful engagement among the subset of users who, until that moment, were not paying us any attention at all.