People write emails in their daily life for various purpose. Working in tandem with the from the line, the content of a subject line matters whether a recipient will open an email, delete it immediately, ignore it, file it for future access, report it and/or filter it as spam.
1. Segment/Personalize: Personalize doesn’t take it in sense taking the name with priority in the subject line and then followed with some base information. If you are segmenting your list in any way, then each segment should likely receive appropriate and different subject lines.
2. “Brand” Your Subject Line: Practice that has really taken hold in the last year or two is including the name of your company or newsletter/promotion in the subject line, usually at the front and they are enclosed in brackets for notice.
3. Use a Consistent Style: While subject lines should obviously be different each time, and should be trusted at the first sight with the recognized recipient
4. Have Someone Else Write, Edit or Review Subject Lines: Have someone other than the person who creates the email itself write, edit or at least review the subject line. Use this person like a newspaper headline writer and have them push your copy to another level of relevance and creativity.
5. Send Subject Lines to You: One of the best gauges of the strength of a subject line is to send sample emails with different subject lines to yourself.
6. AOL Subscribers: If you have a high number of AOL subscribers, we generally recommend that you create different versions of your emails. Use peculiar small and more conservative subject lines and include your company or newsletter name, as the AOL client displays the from email address in the inbox, not the from name.
7. “Listen” – Monitor Your Inbox for Ideas: The greatest inspiration for writing subject lines may come from monitoring your own inbox. What type of subject lines intrigues your interest and motivate you to open them immediately? Which kind do you not delete or file, but generally never go back and open?
8. Track Which Subject Line Types Work Best for You: Track and analyze the type of subject lines that produce the best open and click-through rates. open rates give the complete measure of the subject line to drive the complete recipients for the action purpose click on a specific link or links.
9. Think Context – “Google Apologizes”: Get to know all your subscribers. What are they thinking about, what’s in the news, what events and holidays are coming up? One of the best subject lines I’ve seen in years was one that was appeared in the December 2003 newsletter from Web Pro News. The subject line was simply “Google Apologizes.”
10. Test Length – Short versus Long: Analysis of data from our client base suggests that subject lines of less than 50 characters achieve higher open rates than those of 50 or more characters. That being said, there is much debate about shorter versus longer subject lines that encompass more information for recipients. Test various styles and lengths and see what generates the best results with your recipients.
11. Focus: Avoid The Generic and Boring: Don’t be afraid to be very specific in subject lines. Many email marketers use broad and generic subject lines, such as “May 2004 Newsletter” because they fear that a specific subject line may not resonate with all readers. First, remember that generally, only 25 to 50 percent of your recipients are opening your emails, to begin with.
12. Write It Early: Perhaps the most common mistake email marketers make is waiting till the last minute to get framed with the subject lines. Don’t. While everything is still fresh, jot down potential subject lines for your next email. As you pull together your email content, continue drafting up various subject lines allowing you to just tweak or decide which version to use – rather than starting from scratch at the last minute.
13. Push the Envelope: Never step back to use a subject line with creative or aggressive in nature. Try some new styles and test them via split tests. Monitor the results across all metrics open rates, click-through rates, spam complaints, bounce rates and unsubscribe to make sure that a bump in your open rate didn’t lead to an increase in unsubscribing, bounces and spam complaints.
14. Test: The most certain way to know if something is working is to test it. Subject lines are, in fact, the easiest component of email marketing to test. Split and check thoroughly. A key is to test types of subject lines so that you can carry the learning into future distributions. Secondly, you should test at least a few times to make sure your findings were correct.
