Tips for Writing Catchy Email Subject Line
Email Subject Line
Your email subject line is crucial because it’s your first impression. A bad subject line is essentially a really awkward handshake. Since subject lines have a major influence on open rates, the success of your email marketing strategy often boils down to the effectiveness of your subject lines.
Why Email Subject Lines Matter
How many emails in your inbox are ignored? What has to happen for a message to catch your eye?
A few relevant factors matter when it comes to open vs. ignore vs. mark as spam an incoming letter. It can be the reputation of the sender, the presence of “fw:” in the name, and most importantly, the name of the message.
According to statistics, 33 to 47% of recipients open messages in their inbox based just on subject lines for emails.
Important questions to ask about your sales email subject lines:
- What problem are you actually solving?
Rather than listing your marketing products or services, focus on value with the pain point you can solve or how you can improve a certain process. - Who are you selling to?
Identify your decision-maker, their professional background, and anything else you can dig up about how they work. - Would you delete your email?
You can learn a lot from your own inbox. What are the subject lines you never open? Which ones catch your attention? - How can you motivate the prospect to respond?
After conveying the benefits of your marketing product or service, are you offering a discount or limited-time opportunity? - Is your recipient already familiar with your business?
This helps determine whether or not this email is the first impression. - Do you have any mutual connections?
Finding common ground and referencing it in your subject line drastically improves open rates. - Why should they want to open your email?
It could be a cliffhanger or just a really relatable line – either way, your email subject line should be irresistible. - How will you track which subject lines work best?
If you found a subject line that works, you’d want to know about it, right? Tools like email view tracking show you how your subject lines are performing so you can pick a winner and start to identify patterns.
Simple tricks that you can put into practice immediately to increase open rates
Use numbers
Numbers are your email subject line’s best friends.
Extensive A/B tests by email platform Campaign Monitor found subject lines with numbers achieved a 57 percent better open rate than those without.
Remember, characters count.
Next, remember real estate for your subject lines is very limited. Desktops usually display about 60 characters and digital mobile devices about 25 to 30.
So, where will your subscribers first see your emails? Will it be scrolling their inbox on their smartphones after waking up? Or will it be on their laptop?
Unsure? Then optimize for both scenarios.
Use these 10 words that increase open rates.
No matter where you’re trying to woo people with the magic of copywriting, your words matter. Here are 10 power words to test in your next digital campaign that an email analysis report by Adestra has found to increase open rates:
(thanks – golden – iPhone – breaking – advice – course – thank you – exclusive – review – top stories)
Skip these 10 words that decrease open rates.
For every word that increases open rates, there’s one that tanks them. Here are 10 words that decrease open rates (and may even trigger spam filters), as reported in the Return Path study previously mentioned:
(get rid of – secret of – shocking – what you need to know – won’t believe – quickest – aim – call – put – 2 for 1)
Do your own A/B testing.
Because you’re a smart marketer, you probably take advice from “experts” with a dash of skepticism. That’s good. So do I!
That’s why I urge you to do your own A/B testing. It’s no secret that my audience isn’t your marketing audience, and copy-and-paste marketing can do more harm than good. You need to contextualize best practices to your own list.