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Tips for Better Email Subject Lines

Guest post by: Karen Scharf

Article Overview: Email subject lines are the first impression that potential customers get when it comes to email marketing strategies. Since email subject lines are generally less than 50 characters and most people make a split second decision about whether or not to open the email itself, creating them is a daunting task.

Tips for Better Email Subject Lines

Email subject lines are the first impression that potential customers get when it comes to email marketing strategies. Since email subject lines are generally less than 50 characters and most people make a split second decision about whether or not to open the email itself, creating them is a daunting task. As the creator of an email marketing message you have only seconds to impress your readers. You have to convince them that your email is not spam, not a virus, and not pointless in just a few words. If you fail to do this well, your email marketing campaign will fail miserably. That's a lot of pressure. However, achieving this task isn't all together impossible. There are some things that you can do to improve your chances of getting customers to open that email.

** Make Your Email Subject Lines Personal

Creating an email subject line that includes personal information is far more likely to get readers to take the plunge and open your message. You could simply use a subject line such as "Hey Teddy Open This!" and get some significant results, but spammers also use this technique rather rampantly. Many customers will still ignore subjects like this, thanks to their tarnished reputation. However, personalization doesn't stop there.

Using customer purchase history is one way you can personalize your email subject lines without the old boring "Hey Teddy" technique. For example, if you run a hobby supply shop and your customer regularly purchases knitting supplies, a subject line such as "Knitting Supplies Half-Off Today Only!" is probably going to get her attention pretty quickly.

Other ways of personalizing an email subject line are to invite inactive customers back, with an incentive. Also if customers have abandoned a shopping cart recently, you may want to remind them of this in the subject line. This can often lead to a sale; when the customer remembers the abandoned purchase; they are more likely to follow through.

** Time is of the Essence

Another smart way to get customers to open an email is by attaching a sense of urgency to the task at hand. If customers believe that a promotion is only going to be available for a certain day or a limited amount of hours, they are going to be more interested. Furthermore, if you can convince them that the product is available in limited supply, they are going to be more interested. The same sort of idea has helped to fuel the day of Thanksgiving shopping phenomenon for years.

** Test the Waters

Using a technique that most email marketers refer to as A/B marketing can help to improve your marketing results. The way it works is that you create two different subject lines promoting the same product. They need to be different in wording but promote the same product for this little test to work the best. Then you take around 25% of your customer base and divide them into even groups. Send one group subject line A and the other group subject line B. Once you have done this you can determine which subject line was more popular by the amount of customers that responded. Whichever line garnered the most attention is the one to roll out to the rest of your mailing list. Voila!

A/B testing can be used in a variety of ways. It can be used to determine if positive or negative lines work best, if your old favorite line works as well as a new line that is making a lot of buzz, and if personalization really works for your business. It is a valuable tool to keep in your marketing bag.

Because email subject lines are critical to the success of your small business marketing program, they should not be taken lightly. Take the time to develop and test your email subject lines and you're sure to see your email marketing results improve.

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Article Tags: email, email marketing, subject lines



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Creating unique forum post titles - Hi Evan, As one of the people who spends the most time in these forums, I don't really think it's a sustainable idea to ask users to create unique "Subject Titles" for every post. Even forum loyalists (including myself) are bound to forget on occasion, while the average user won't even care. Instead, would there be a way to leave the "Subject Titles" blank and only allow posts with manually created titles to be submitted? Most people would be too lazy to copy the original title and would therefore be forced to think of a new one (which would likely be unique).
Subject line Etiquette - Another email rant: Is there some place on the internet that outlines proper "Subject line" headings? There mus be a system out there that people use to be more efficient email senders. Not everything that comes into my mail box requires my immediate attention. I would love to educate myself and the people who send me emails on proper subject lines. Maybe something like: "Urgent Review: <<Title of document>>" "Decision Required: "<<Subject matter>>" just something for me to quickly scan the subject lines and decide which ones need my immediate attention. Anyone know of such email standards that exist out there?
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Re: Subject line Etiquette - [quote="jvprosperity":btyoa0j1]Another email rant: Is there some place on the internet that outlines proper "Subject line" headings? There mus be a system out there that people use to be more efficient email senders. Not everything that comes into my mail box requires my immediate attention. I would love to educate myself and the people who send me emails on proper subject lines. Maybe something like: "Urgent Review: <<Title of document>>" "Decision Required: "<<Subject matter>>" just something for me to quickly scan the subject lines and decide which ones need my immediate attention. Anyone know of such email standards that exist out there?[/quote:btyoa0j1] Hi Andy, The only system I know of at the moment is the "Set Priority" feature on MS Outlook. It allows you to add an exclamation mark to flag the message as being of high, normal or low priority. However, I'd say that a "sender" is still better off using the phone rather than sending an email that's labeled "urgent".


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