During the recent presidential campaigns, Obama raised $690m from online donations. The majority of that was driven by the campaign's email marketing efforts, which relied on constant A/B testing. The campaign found that casual email titles were the most effective, with the most successful title being "Hey". Another big winner was "I will be outspent". Mild profanity also garnered more donations than other variants -- one of the most successful titles was "Hell yeah, I like Obamacare".
The campaign team found that they were terrible at predicting which titles would be successful, and this experience reinforced their reliance on A/B testing. Another thing that they found was that each title had a shelf-life before it had to be replaced with something else. Also, they got very few unsubscribes, despite their emails being frequently and publicly ridiculed as "strange, incessant, and weirdly over-familiar". The lesson they took was that people have a very high tolerance for spam, since unsubscribes were not correlated with email frequency.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/the-science-behind-those-obama-campaign-e-mails
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