6 Tips For Writing The Perfect Email Subject Line



To make matters worse, buyers don’t even bother opening your emails if you have terrible subject lines. Therefore, it is critical to write an appealing email subject line that would entice your recipients to open and read your emails. Here are the 6 tips to help you write an email subject line that can increase email open rate. An email with a blank subject line will likely get deleted, lost, or immediately irritate the recipient, who is forced to open the email to figure out what it's about. Write the subject line first. Subject lines framed as questions often perform better. Keep subject lines short: According to a survey email subject lines with 6-10 word had a 21% open rate. Those with subject lines containing 5 or fewer words ranked second with a 16% open rate, and those with 11-15 words had a 14% open rate.

Just as writing great headlines can attract more readers to your blog, a well-written email subject line can increase the number of subscribers who will actually open your email messages.

The job of a subject line is simple: Get the reader to open the email. On average, 33 percent of recipients open emails based on its subject line, so it’s incredibly important to get it right — because even the most enticing email in the world won’t matter if the reader ignores it.

Here are my top tips for crafting email subject lines that won’t get ignored.

Keep it short

6 Tips For Writing The Perfect Email Subject Line

In most browsers, email subject lines are cut off after about 60 characters. Mobile devices allow for even fewer characters, so try to make your point in under eight words. You may even find that a subject line with only one or two words stands out in most people’s cluttered inboxes.

I regularly check my emails on my mobile phone. I recently received the email below:

As you can see, the subject line is far too long. I am being asked to try a bag containing a mystery product. The subject line is doing nothing to make me want to find out more, so I choose to ignore this email.

However, if you look at the same email message when opened on a desktop computer, I have a completely different user experience. I like coffee. I can try a bag of freshly roasted Pact Coffee for just £1. I’m going to open the email and find out how I can claim this amazing offer.

With 66% of emails being opened on a smartphone or tablet, and with mobile traffic growing year on year, the importance of subject line length should not be underestimated.

Ask a question

Asking a question in your subject line gets your recipient thinking. Think of it as a means of starting up a dialogue that can only be continued through opening your email to find the answer. For best results, try asking questions that target the sort of problems your customer or prospect is likely to encounter, and for which they need a solution:

  • Do you want to improve your email open rates?
  • Local knowledge panel not showing on Google?
  • Is your website ‘mobile friendly’?

These types of subject lines are effective, as the recipient can relate to them and are drawn to the prospect of learning more. Just make sure you don’t forget to answer the question in the content of the email.

Set expectations

Use your subject line to let recipients know what they can expect to see when they open your email.

  • Use lists – 3 ways to improve your email open rates
  • Create ‘how to’ or ‘tips’ emails – how to improve your email open rates
  • Highlight offers – get your free email marketing benchmark report

A key part of this is to also make sure your subject line is relevant to the content inside the email. Always deliver on your promises. If you say there are three tips in the subject line, include three tips in the copy!

Use humour

Humour is a great tool to drive open rates and get your subscribers to engage with your content. Here are some great examples of how humorous subject lines have been used that you can use as a source of inspiration.

A few warnings, though, when using humour:

  • Don’t be offensive
  • Don’t lose your company voice
  • Use it sparingly – it’s only one of many subject line writing techniques

Create a sense of urgency

These types of subject lines encourage recipients to act now. FOMO, the fear of missing out, is a great way to build excitement and drive email opens. The most popular way that a lot of organisations do this, is by including words and phrases such as:

  • Last Chance
  • Today Only
  • 24 Hour Deal
  • Exclusive

You can see some examples of how some of the organisations I am a customer of have employed this tactic to make their emails stand out in my inbox:

Get personal

Personalisation is a great way to increase open rates. According to an Experian Email Marketing study, emails with personalised subject lines have 26% higher unique open rates. You can personalise your subject lines by either using the recipient’s name, or the recipient’s company’s name. The image above, again, highlights how EE and Amazon use this tactic to drive email opens:

Rainu meet our best ever offer for iPad Mini

Rainu Bhele: Free Kindle Book

Tread carefully when it comes to personalisation. If your email database does not feature your customers’ most up to date details, you might find personalisation has a detrimental effect on your open rates.

Conclusion

These tips are just some of the ways that you can increase your email open rates. But as vital as it is to encourage people to open your emails, it’s even more important to ensure that, once they’re in, they like what they see. Even if your email subject lines are absolutely irresistible, if you consistently deliver underwhelming content, your customers will lose interest.

Use good subject lines in conjunction with high quality, relevant content to keep your open rates consistently high, and drive more conversions.

6 Tips For Writing The Perfect Email Subject Line Example

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There is both an art and a science to writing an effective email.

And with all due respect to content marketing, email is the true king. Pound for pound, nothing delivers better results:

To summarize, email is popular – the number of worldwide users is expected to hit 4.3 billion by 2022 – powerful, and effective. It works for lead generation, acquisition, and retention. It’s the consumer-preferred communication channel for retail, travel and hospitality, entertainment, non-profit, digital media, publication, and many other industries.

PREFERENCE OF COMMUNICATION FROM RETAIL BRANDS

Point of story? Use it. If you’re not yet, start today. And if you are already, use it more often.

That’s the good news. The ‘bad’ news? It’s not as simple as cranking out quick messages and sending them out. To do it well, you need to study it, practice it, track it, and tweak it.

Stick to best practices, stay abreast of changes and trends, try a few battle-tested formulas, and automate whenever possible to squeeze every drop of potential from it.

For example, try these tips and tricks to make a good tactic even better:

  • Using a real name in the sender field can increase both open and click-through rates by as much as 35%.
  • A segmented email campaign generates 14.31% more opens, 100.95% more clicks, and 3.90% fewer abuse reports.
  • Emails with a visual component have a better open (26.89%) and click-through rate (4.36%) than those with just text.

Your email message needs to be short, concise, and personalized. And you absolutely, positively mustfollow-up on unanswered messages.

Another study from Yesware showed a bigger drop at each subsequent message, but the response rates were still high enough to make it worthwhile.

The more messages you send, the more opportunities your recipient has to respond to you. But don’t just send the same exact message seven times. That will annoy your target, damage your reputation, and possibly get you relegated to the spam folder (where businesses go to die).

Just as there’s an art and science to writing an initial email, there’s a separate art and science to writing an effective follow-up email. They may be the same species, but they are most definitely different breeds.

When it comes to email marketing and outreach, it’s follow-up, follow-up, follow-up.

The Secret Sauce

That said, your subject line is even more important in your follow up email. It’s your calling card, your introduction. It’s what gets you in the door. David Ogilvy famously said that your headline is 80 cents out of your dollar.

6 Tips For Writing The Perfect Email Subject Line For A

Your subject line is your headline. Spend that 80 cents wisely.

  • Nearly half of people (47%) decide whether to open an email based on the subject line alone.
  • 62% of recipients open an email based on a personalized subject line.
  • A personalized subject line can deliver a 29.3% open rate lift.

You need compelling and enticing email copy, of course. But if your subject line falls short, no one is going to see it anyway.

Ready to try a follow-up email campaign? Give your follow-up subject lines a shot in the arm with these 9 tips.

There are a lot of dos and don’ts on the web when it comes to, well, everything. And most of it is good advice.

But sometimes it’s worth the risk to toss it all out the window and see what happens. The results might surprise you.

For example, most how-to guides warn about using emojis in your subject lines because it makes you look amateurish and grabs the attention of spam filters.

However, subject lines with emojis have a higher read and placement rate than those that are text-based, especially around the holidays.

Emojis definitely stand out in a crowded inbox, and grabbing the reader’s attention is an important element of email engagement. There aren’t a lot of email marketers using them today, so there’s a novelty factor involved.” ~Tom Sather, Sr. Director of Research at Return Path

Furthermore, spam trigger words like ‘free’ are best avoided, but a select few might actually increase your open and click-through rates when used sparingly. Because everyone ignores them, these words can make your email stand out in an inbox. The only way to find out? Test and see.

Consider the amount of emails we receive on a typical day. It’s in the dozens, if not hundreds, so anything you can do to draw attention to a previous connection – no matter how tenuous – is worth the effort.

If an email is a follow-up email, point that out in your subject line. Maybe the recipient read your previous message and meant to respond, in which case you’re in. If not, he or she may at least recognize your name and click to see what you have to say this time. Worst-case scenario? Your name will sound vaguely familiar – giving you an edge over the other 32 emails clogging their inbox – while your reference to a previous message seals the deal.

A follow-up email that just repeats the previous one verbatim – or even in a different way – is not going to convert. It’s been said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

It won’t happen.

Your follow-up subject line needs to sweeten the deal with a coupon, discount, or limited time offer, highlight a different benefit, or appeal to a different emotion.

Give them a new reason to open your second (or third, or fourth) email that they didn’t have before. Hit the right trigger, and they’ll click and convert.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Put yourself in the shoes of your intended target. Why would that person not respond to an email? If you can identify it, you can address it in your subject line.

Too expensive? Offer a discount. Security concerns? Demonstrate your trustworthiness. Wrong pain point? Switch it up.

To do this, you need an intimate understanding of your target audience, and you can get that from the creation of detailed buyer personas. You have those, right?

Identify and remove the friction points = a higher open rate.

Ever get an email from info@example.com or sales@example.com? We all have. Ever felt compelled to open it? Probably not.

We respond to people, not departments. A quick fix for your subject line or sender field is to use your real name.

Use the same name in each follow-up message. Names mean real individuals, not bots or spam.

Hubspot increased both the open rate and click-through rate simply by changing the sender from “Hubspot” to “Maggie Georgieva, Hubspot.”

How’s that for a quick win?

When it comes to our inbox, we don’t like surprises. Your subject line should explicitly state what is in the email. No cutesy puns, no word play, just a simple statement of fact.

If it’s an invitation to a free trial, say that. If it’s a download link for your new ebook, tell them so. Clear beats clever every day of the week.

The most effective subject lines usually fall into one of three broad categories: benefit, logic, or threat.

Benefit? Highlight an advantage to the reader. Logic? It’s something everyone wants or needs, and appeals to common sense. Threat? Create some urgency and/or play on their fear of missing out (FOMO).

If your initial email utilizing benefits didn’t get a response, try a subject line that leans on logic or threat. Mix it up.

I’ve already suggested you ignore conventional wisdom at least sometimes. That doesn’t mean you should do it all the time. Some things are taboo for a very good reason.

Five of the best of the worst? Using re: or fwd: in your subject line, having way too many emojis (one, maybe two, at most), YELLING IN ALL-CAPS, spelling mistakes, and more than one spam trigger word (and even when you use one, it should be a limited-run test scenario).

Don’t do any of those.

6 Tips For Writing The Perfect Email Subject Line Examples

Finding what ultimately works best for you and your recipients is going to be a trial-and-error affair. So try. Fail. Hypothesize and test your subject line ideas to confirm and validate.

Keep trying. Keep testing. The better you get with them, the more your email copy will see the light of day (so keep trying, testing, and learning about that, too).

It does get easier. And faster. And more efficient.

Spend your 80 cents wisely so you can get more from the remaining 20. Subject lines matter.

Email marketing theory is great. The tips and tricks described above should help you come up with the best copy for your campaigns.

But if you want a shortcut to the whole process, try the 25 subject line examples below to get started:

1.“Did you see this?”

Use this subject line to share recent news items about your company or to call attention to features your recipient may not know about.

2. “Another question for you”

This subject line works best if you’re sending multiple follow-ups. Build on past engagement by continuing to gather more information.

3. “A quick favor”

People want to be helpful. Give them a quick task to do that takes them further into your sales funnel.

4. “Your feedback?”

Perfect

Similarly, people love to share their thoughts. Show how much you value their opinion by asking for their feedback.

5. “What do you think?”

This broad subject line can be used plenty of different ways. Sharing an article about a trend in your industry, for example, demonstrates that you appreciate their professional opinion.

6. “What would you say?”

Use this subject line to invite recipients to a meeting (or to take any other desired action).

7. “Can you help?”

Make a genuine request to build your relationship.

8. “10 minutes of your time?”

This simple and direct follow-up can be used when you’ve got an engaged prospect you want to get on the phone.

9. “A new ebook for you”

Use resources like ebooks to keep the conversation going.

10. “I think you’ll like this article”

If you don’t have resources of your own to share, pull one from a reputable industry source to create the same effect.

11. “Have you dealt with this before?”

Emphasize the pain points you’ve solved for other customers to prove your expertise to recipients.

12. “Just one day left”

If you have a promotion that’s close to ending, use a follow-up subject line like this to inspire that all-important FOMO.

13. “Closing soon”

But be real. If your promotion isn’t actually closing soon, don’t lie about it in your email.

14. “Let’s get started”

This simple, direct subject line gets to the point and shows you’re serious about helping your recipient.

15. “Can we chat tomorrow?”

Chats are simple and non-threatening. Putting a timeframe on your request makes it more concrete.

16. “Let’s connect”

When concrete isn’t appropriate, keep your request more vague. But make it clear you’re still interested in working together.

17. “Next steps”

Send this subject line to practical recipients. They’ll be primed and ready to take action.

18. “X ways to get started”

Even better, expand on what’s needed to get started. People love lists.

19. “The information I promised”

If you’ve promised to share resources or information with prospects, a subject line like this creates a nice new touchpoint.

20. “I forgot to mention”

If you happen to “forget” something in conversation, this follow-up email subject line helps you keep the conversation going.

21. “Will you be there?”

If you’ll be attending an industry event or event in your area, reach out to prospects who might be there as well with this follow-up line.

22. “Have you tried this?”

Adapt this one for your needs. Use it to lead into messages on anything from problem-solving tips to new restaurants.

23. “Who else can I help?”

Tips

Usually, you should wait to ask for referrals until you’ve proven your value to a customer. But if prospects aren’t responding, why not throw in a Hail Mary request to see if they can send you in someone else’s direction?

24. “Are you still interested?”

If the conversation’s stopped, there’s nothing wrong with asking whether you should keep reaching out.

25. “I’ll leave you alone”

Finally, this subject line formula lets you exit the conversation gracefully, without ghosting on recipients. And who knows? It might just get the attention of a prospect who’s been interested, but too busy to follow up with you.

What’s your go-to formula for scintillating subject lines? Leave your ideas in the comments below:
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