Effective email subjects for roundup/curated newsletters
Roundup or curated newsletters feature a number of links or items on different topics.
So it's difficult to come up with an effective email subject that captures the spirit of an issue and improves the open rate. Using the newsletter's name and issue number is hardly compelling and doesn't differentiate enough.
A typical issue of my newsletter features half a dozen links. In the subject, I provide 3-4 word summaries or teasers of two the most interesting or useful links.
Some roundup newsletters, like mine, have a short intro or commentary section. Summarizing or teasing the intro is another option, and I may experiment with that. However, the introductory part is not significantly longer than the items in the main body.
What other types of email subjects do you use for roundup or curated newsletters? Do you have any experience to share?
I curate 10 to 20 articles a week too. Struggled a lot with subjects in the past.
Tried 2 word subjects (on the top topic of the week) after the name of the newsletter and the edition number.
Now I use the title of the best read of the week. I like it, it gives it more gravitas for new readers.
Old readers are gonna open when they get it, no matter what.
Mailchimp keeps hounding me my subjects are too long. who cares? our gmail has a lot of room.
One note: The first two words matter the most. I have the name of the newsletter there.
Here's how I show that the first two words matter. I heard this story from a tv producer.
He was making Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Originally the title was "The Queer Eye for the Straight Guy". They had a huge fight over it. The network wanted to drop "the" and he didn't. It was the biggest deal. The network had to tell him: "people only read the first two words in the tv guide".
"The Queer" vs "Queer Eye"
And to this day, he says its the biggest thing that the network was right about and he was wrong. It's still called "Queer Eye" now.
I'll experiment with a reference to the best or most significant read of the issue. And you make a good point about picking the first words.
With Bytesized Weekly, I mostly keep it simple — I just use the titles of some of the content I'm linking (from tomorrow's newsletter: "Things I Wish I’d Known About CSS" and "Lies, Damned Lies, and Front-end Tracking"). If there's a pretty consistent theme, I'll list a couple, like "10 tools you need for VS Code, a new code editor, and more" but find that generally the above content-based subject lines do pretty well. It turns out that even blog posts are generally trying to do the same semi-clickbait-y titles that newsletters often do. :)
BTW, ConvertKit has a great A/B testing feature where I can try two different subject lines with (IIRC) 30% of my list, and it'll send out the better performing one to the remaining 70%. When I mentioned two subject lines above, one of those will be chosen as the "winning" subject and be sent to the majority of my ~4k subscribers.
Good idea about consistent themes, they're another opportunity.
Hey @PaoloAmoroso good thread!
I'm running a roundup / curated newsletters around the virtual event space, it would be awesome to hear your opinion.
Thanks, there's much to think about from the contributions to this discussion.
You have an interesting newsletter based on an original and quite timely idea. I see you're using the name and issue number as the subject line.
Hey @PaoloAmoroso - Thanks for your feedback :) Would you mind if you use your comment as a quote?
Sure.
Thank you for posting this discussion! I've just gone with "Newsletter name issue #" so far. Interesting discussion around other formats!
You're welcome. Right now I'm using subjects that focus on the issue's main topic but there are no noticeable changes in engagement. This requires a lot of experimentation.
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@jkristobans thanks, you make a good point. I subscribe to several "open first, think later" newsletters. The issue is how to get that kind of recognition when starting out.
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Sure, I'm in for the long term and I'm not discouraged. But I wondered whether there's anything about subjects I'm overlooking.