How Do You Decide On A Killer Subject Line?
It goes without saying that your subject line determines whether your email will be read. It's important to balance between salesy and not-spammy.
A great way to visualize this is go to the trash folder and check out the subject lines of the emails you deleted. There is a good chance that they fall in one of these two categories:
- You deleted them because they were either irrelevant or that you felt that they were spammy advertisements.
- They were automatically marked as spam because of their content
Here are my observations by going through my own spam folder:
1. Personalize your email- address a subscriber by name. By not collecting names of users we save one extra field but that takes away the opportunity to personalize our emails. I've now learnt the value of collecting names to avoid the spam folder.
2. Use the curiosity element - like "That magical feeling of your first sale". By opening the email our subscribers are giving us their valuable time. In exchange we need to provide value in terms of an offer or by generating curiosity.
3. Provide something of value (can be offers or discounts) - This need not always be discount by anything that your subscriber would feel valuable. Can be just a life lesson. By articulating it properly, you get your reader's attention.
4. Sense of urgency - "Tonight-> How to start your side business?" if you allow them to save it for later, 7 out of 10 times the later won't come- life is busy.
Let me know your thoughts on these ideas.
I use 1 or 2 word subject lines.
Interesting! Can you give a few examples? Also what's you open rate?
Examples would be based on what you're doing. A single word or 2 word phrase works better than anything I've ever done otherwise.
if you want to connect with someone " Connect" or "Connecting" or "Building Network"
If you want to ask questions of someone, find the right person. "Request" or "Questions" or add the topic: "Crypto Questions" or "Marketing Request" or "Decision"
Do you find this works for newsletters as well? Or mainly for direct-ask emails?
I've never tried this with newsletters because I usually have the name of the newsletter in the subject line too.
These are valid points. I just wrote about this subject line topic in more in depth in this post. A few that you said are also covered there. I hope it's helpful for you.
For email subject lines, I like to look at companies who handle a lot of email, like Mailchimp. They wrote some articles on subject lines, such as
https://mailchimp.com/resources/catchy-email-subject-lines/
https://mailchimp.com/help/best-practices-for-email-subject-lines/
And yep - I'd also recommend short subject lines. Mailchimp recommends a maximum of 60 characters.
Thanks for sharing this!
I would agree in general, but it depends a lot on your audience. The best thing I did was testing new subject lines. Depending on your audience size. Let's say 10000 for simplicity. Take 1000 and divide it by 2 so you have two testing groups each 500 people. Now test two subject lines and send it out the the rest 9000 with the better performing one.
I agree. In fact I've subscribed to over a 100 of them while carrying out an experiment and some of the marketers carry so much trust that you'd open their mails without hesitation, irrespective of their subject lines. But I believe they are exceptions falling somewhere in the 1-2% of overall marketers.
I would 1000% read a blog post on the results of this! Are you planning to write one?