Email Marketing – 5 Subject Line Tips
Posted by George Palatine on February 16th, 2009
Ask any email marketing professional and they will tell you deliverability is key to your email success. Your message has to make it to the inbox before your audience can read it. Once delivered however you need to have your message cut through the other noise in people’s inbox these days. How do you do that? For starters writing an effective subject will help to get your message noticed – and hopefully opened.
Here are a few tips for writing effective subject lines.
1. Keep It Simple. Don’t try and over engineer your subject line. Be sure and use 10 words or less (5 is better) and put the most important part of the message in front. Never use all caps and avoid any unnecessary punctuation.
2. Think relationship, not message. Remember you should be trying to build relationships with your readers. Each message you send should try and strengthen that relationship and reaffirm readers why they signed up in the first place. Each message should not be an isolated communication but instead should be somehow related to previous/future emails.
3. Focus on content instead of on “entity”. Let people know what they can expect by opening your message. If your content is truly relevant to your audience a descriptive subject line will improve your chances of being opened. Example: “How to boil an egg” is better than “January cooking news”
4. Have someone write the subject line that did not write the copy. Why? Sometimes the email’s author can be too close to the material. Have someone read the message and sum up the key points. Use this as your starting point and then craft the subject while thinking, “why is this important to my audience and how will they benefit”.
5. Test, test and test. All people are not the same so don’t treat your email audience as if they were. Different people will react to different messages. Use a few different subject lines for each campaign and see which perform the best. Begin to segment your audience based on the message types they commonly react to.
For more information on subject lines be sure and download our white paper, “The Seven Dirty Words you can’t say in subject lines”
[...] good sender reputation, recognizable “From” name, quality subject line and effective use of pre-header text are all ways to get into—and stand out—in subscriber [...]