2 For 1 On Subject Lines

By following these quick and simple rules to write awesome subject lines you will increase your chances of getting your marketing campaign emails opened. For a double bonus, you can also apply these rules to your social media posts to increase click through rates.

To create a successful email marketing campaign you need your subscribers to open those emails. The key to this is your subject line. 35% of email recipients decide whether or not to open an email based on subject line alone.

So make sure you write attention grabbing subject lines that beat that spam filter with these 10 simple rules:

1. Stay under 50 characters

Be concise with your subject line. You only have a limited space to fit your entire subject line so use it wisely. You don’t want half of your message to cut off, oops!

2. Use a familiar sender name

43% of email recipients click the Spam button based on the email “from” name or email address. To stop being canned into the Spam trash bin, use a personal from email and avoid generic or ‘noreply’s.

3. Don’t use CAPITALS

There are three reasons why you shouldn’t use capitals in your email subject lines.

• 1. All caps can come across loud and in your face, nobody wants to receive that in their inbox.
  2. All caps can be difficult for people to read, causing them to ignore or delete your email.
  3. More than 85% of email users prefer an all-lowercase subject line to one in all caps.

4. Start with action

It’s all very psychological but using verbs invites the user to take action on your email. It doesn’t need to be a verb asking them to open the email. Simply using a verb relating to the end goal of your email will be enough.

5. Don’t over-do the exclamation marks

Similar to the “Don’t use CAPITALS” rule, you don’t want to come across as loud. Use them sparingly to highlight action or to create a sense of urgency.

6. Add preview text

This is the text that appears next to your subject line in many email clients such as Gmail. When you don’t set the preview text yourself, the email client will automatically fill it with your email text. Depending on your email body content, the default preview text could look messy, so set your preview text to avoid wasting the opportunity to engage with your audience.

7. Use personalisation tokens

Emails that use the first name of the recipient in their subject line have higher click through rates than emails that did not. Need we say more.

8. Localisation

If you hold the right data you could include location into the personalisation of your emails. This shows your audience you know more about them than just their email address which can build trust. Trust is will make it more likely that your audience will open your emails.

9. Use numbers

An easy way to stand out from the other emails in your audience’s inbox is to use numbers. Many will be using textual subject lines so your audience eyes will be immediately drawn to your email in their list of emails.

10. Be creative

This is the most important rule. We each receive hundreds of emails every day, so to stand out you must be creative whilst considering your purpose and audience. For example: What connotations can you create in your subject line? Can you play on your audience interests to make a joke or personal connection? Are you selling one particular product? If so you might want to create scarcity.

By following these quick and simple rules to write awesome subject lines you will increase your chances of getting your emails opened. You can even apply these rules to your social media posts to increase click through rates.

If you need help to achieve awesome subject lines that get your marketing campaign emails opened, then we would be more than happy to help. Give us a call on 01536 560 435.