Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

We’ve only tested two officially. But I’ve informally tested about 6 over the past few months.

Winner: Arial font at 11 pt.

The official and most scientific test was Arial font against Courier font.

Speaking with my colleagues from another site who do subscription newsletters, they swore Courier worked best for an older generation who grew up on newsprint. However, I had a feeling that my audience liked the clear, clean lines of Arial.

But does it really matter? In our test we sent 20,000 emails over a 7 day period with the exact same subject lines and content. Only the font was different in the A/B test:

Email messages in Arial font:
Open rate: 34.2%
Click rate: 9.6%

Email messages in Courier font:
Open rate: 31.8%
Click rate: 7.9%

Arial wins – but not by a huge margin. Enough that we’ll be using Arial for all our messages going forward.

One question I’m still not sure about: Why would open rate be affected if they haven’t seen the font yet? My guess is that email programs like Gmail show a snippet of the message and so they do see the font before actually opening the message. Let me know if you have any insight on that.

Interesting side note: Spam complaints with Arial: .02%. Spam complaints with Courier .09%. For whatever reason, Courier messages occasionally got people to click the “Spam” button in their email program more than Arial. That sample size is small enough to be an error either way, but my sense is that people just didn’t like the Courier format and it smelled more like spam to them.

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