Grabbing the attention of the average person via email is quite a challenge these days. We’re all bombarded with marketing messages – not just via email, but television, radio and even when we walk down the street. This has somewhat of a numbing effect. Effective email subject lines play an crucial role in having your communication jump out at the user in amongst a crowded inbox.
Different sorts of email campaigns need a different approach to subject lines. The two main types of list communications are sales based (general email offers) and information based (newsletters).
Newsletter subject lines should be informational than hypey and general campaign subject lines should be to the point without overselling.
The following are some tried and tested tips based on my own experience and from other research; however, there’s no hard and fast rules and each list has its own culture – so experiment to find what suits your target group the best!
General guidelines
- Subject lines should 51 characters long at the most to take into account the varying subject line display lengths of different email software and services. If your subject line needs to be longer, ensure the important information is at the beginning.
- Be wary of words that may trigger spam filters such as free and “special offer” – words that infer selling tend to score higher during spam filtering processes and in conjunction with other scores applied to the email’s body content, may put the message over the threshold. Even punctuation and symbols in a subject line such as ! and $ can result in your email being filtered. Before sending out a campaign or newsletter, try sending a test message to different services to see if it gets through.
- SHOUTING (caps lock) should be avoided. It’s another spammer/scammer trick and isn’t considered to be good email etiquette.
Email marketing subject lines
The use of a company name as the first word in a subject line is said to help achieve high open rates. If you don’t want to take up space by doing so, put the company name in the from line, along with a human name.
Example:
Clayton [Netrepreneur.com]
Use the person’s first name in a subject line if you have that information, followed by a question.
Example:
Fred, looking for email software?
Try to arouse curiosity.
Example:
Fred, something I need your feedback on.
Describe the email’s contents and an incentive for the reader to open it.
Example:
Discount tennis shoes – details inside
Create a sense of urgency without going overboard.
Example:
Fred, bbq markdown – today only
Newsletter subject lines
I’ve trialled various subject line formats for newsletters:
- Newsletter name followed by the date
- A nonsensical subject line made up of terms in the newsletter
- Highlighting an article in the newsletter
- Several highlights from the newsletter
Based on open rates, I’ve found the last variation to prove the most successful. Only having a newsletter title and date is rather ho-hum, using creative subject lines forces folks to do mental gymnastics and a single item mentioned may only appeal to small segment.
It can be rather challenging quoting multiple newsletter highlights due to the small amount of space, but I feel there’s a better chance of grabbing more people’s attention by doing so.
A newsletter I get uses the single item approach – and it’s stopped me from opening many of their newsletters, purely because I didn’t think the contents would be of interest to me. I kept a series of these emails and found out of 20 newsletters I received, I only opened only 5 of them shortly after receipt. After reviewing them all, I found that over a dozen had content not mentioned in the subject line that was of interest to me.
I suggest mentioning at least two items in an email newsletter subject line. In the case of my newsletter, a from and subject line might read something like:
From: Clayton [Netrepreneur.com]
Subject: PCI compliance, title tag tips, boosting rankings & more
The from line format helps with recognition and adds a touch of humanity. The subject line covers different different topics to appeal to different groups and alerts the person to the fact there’s additional items in the newsletter.
Honing a subject line format takes time and patience, but without some way of tracking how many times an email was viewed, you’re working blind. If you’re in the market for email marketing/list management software, make sure it’s able to track unique opens.
