A game of numbers - email marketing

Over the past few months, I've been working a lot on pushing prospects through the sales cycle through more effective emails.  The first step?  Getting people to open emails!  To improve our open rate I've been testing a few things:

• From name: generic (e.g. Product Management); my name; gender neutral name
• Subject lines: I keep all under 40-characters, but the gist varies from opening with an action to opening with a noun
• Splitting lists: I split lists for email tests regardless, but I'm also splitting lists to see if my bounce rate is lower thus increasing the odds of an email making it through when I intend it to
• Varying send times / dates: many of the emails I work on are trigger based, so they drop people into a drip flow after someone performs some action - the timeline post action can vary, though (e.g. sending a follow up email after 4-days or after 7)

What have I been finding?

• From personal names work!  I increased open rates by nearly 10% based on changing from names.
• Action oriented subject lines, drive people to act - AKA, ditch the fluff.
• Still on the fence on splitting lists
• Times depend entirely on what the trigger was - if it was a subscription form, tighter timeline is more effective.

Here are a few resources I like:

• Mail Chimp findings on subject lines
• Marketing Sherpa email studies
• Marketing Charts email open rates