Subject Line Playbook
I led the strategy, alignment, and execution of a scalable promotional subject line playbook for Wayfair’s Specialty Retail Brands – AllModern, Birch Lane, and Joss & Main – bringing brand voice, customer needs, and testing rigor into a single source of truth.
The result was clearer, more elevated promotional messaging, stronger cross-functional alignment, and a repeatable framework that improved efficiency with no negative impact to performance.
Client
AllModern, Birch Lane, Joss & Main
Year
2024 – 2025
Role
Copy Manager (Content Strategy Lead, Promotional Messaging)
Impact at a Glance
Elevated promotional subject lines across three specialty retail brands
Partner feedback reduced by nearly 100%
Team efficiency improved with no negative performance impact
Background
Wayfair’s Specialty Retail Brands operate as distinct home e-commerce sites with different customer needs, brand voices, and competitive sets. Promotional emails were sent to the full email file with the goal of driving traffic to sitewide and category-level promotions.
Prior to this work, subject lines across brands had become increasingly aggressive, with heavy use of all caps, emojis, and urgency tactics, which put the brands out of step with direct specialty competitors and risked undermining brand perception.
Challenge
This work required balancing brand elevation, performance stability, and operational scale across three distinct brands. I built a playbook that would:
Align promotional subject line strategy with each brand’s positioning and customer expectations
Reduce inconsistency and subjective feedback across teams
Maintain email performance while evolving to a more elevated, specialty-retail voice
Create a scalable system that could adapt over time based on testing and learnings
Strategy
I designed the playbook to function as both a strategic north star and a day-to-day execution tool aligning leadership, empowering writers, and evolving continuously through testing. To secure buy-in, I conducted a competitive analysis of direct specialty home retail competitors, clearly illustrating how our subject lines were more aggressive and less elevated than the market. I recommended immediate tactical changes: reducing all caps, limiting emojis, and creating clearer step-changes in promotional messaging. Later, I evolved the playbook to include brand-specific voice strategies for each promo type, designed tests to validate the strategy and approach, and used testing results to improve execution efficiency.
This work resulted in full alignment with marketing leadership and partners and led to an almost complete elimination of subjective feedback, as teams were now operating from a shared strategy.
Competitive framing shifted the conversation from subjective copy preferences to market-aligned strategy, enabling full leadership buy-in and consistent execution.
Brand-Specific Voice Strategies
Once leadership aligned on the need to further elevate our promotional messaging (January 2025), I fully overhauled the playbook. I created distinct voice strategies by brand, promo type, and promotional tier, grounded in customer behavior and brand positioning.
Examples:
Birch Lane: Leveraged Social Proof to support a customer who values reassurance, quality, and credibility before purchasing.
AllModern: Focused on ease, quality, and curated style, reflecting a customer motivated by simplicity and modern design.
Joss & Main: Expanded on curiosity-driven (“mystery”) subject lines, building on existing strong performance while maintaining an elevated tone.
Each strategy included:
The strategic “why”
Real examples from top-performing internal subject lines
Competitive examples that demonstrated the strategy in action