Every day we all get more and more emails coming into our inbox! People look at email subject lines and the person who sent the email when determining if the email should be read. One of our biggest tasks is to get people to open our email, read it, and then take action! Email marketing is a great way to help build your business while developing a relationship with each person on our list. You may have heard the expression, The money is in the list.” In fact, the correct saying is more like, “The money is in the relationship with the people on your list.”
Email Subject Lines
The first thing you need to get right when it comes to email marketing is the subject line. If you can’t get your subscribers to open your emails, it really doesn’t matter how good the actual email is.
It’s easy to spend a lot of time crafting a great message and then just slap a subject line on it at the end. Spend some time writing them and see what type of headline gets you good open rates. Here are five tips to get you started.
Keep It Short
You want your readers to see the entire email subject line before they click it. You also want to make it easy for people to scan through their emails. Try to get your point across in 50 characters or less. Pay attention to how your subject lines look on your own devices. Remember that one of the things that people scan when deciding what to read are the email subject lines. When you have a short, catchy subject, people will want to read it.
Another great idea is to keep a swipe file of subject lines that grabbed your attention. Even if the emails are on a very different topic, you can adapt them for your own needs.
Avoid “Spammy” Words
Stay away from using any words we all associate with spam emails. Words like “sale”, “discount”, “coupon”, “free”, “limited time offer” and even “reminder” are over used and even if they don’t trigger a spam filter and actually make it to your reader’s inbox, chances are high they’ll get ignored.
Compelling email subject lines are just the opposite. Think about it… When was the last time you opened an email with the subject line, “Make $34,534.53 by spending $3.45” – it just does not happen.
Instead, start by using the emails you’re saving in your swipe file and then go back and see what subject lines got the best open rates. Try to analyze why they worked well for your market. Not everything will work well in every niche. Find the types of subject lines that get your readers to open your emails and tweak from there.
Personalize It
While personalizing emails with someone’s first name has been overused in some markets, it still works well for many of us. Give it try and see if it works for you. Don’t overdo it, but use it when you really need them to open the email. Email subject lines that ALWAYS have the person’s first name will get old quickly. Like other aspects of email, you will want to vary things up. Personalize the email every so often; just do not do it all the time.
Depending on what data you collect when your readers sign up, you can personalize other things like their location for example. Seeing the name of your state or even city in an email subject line is sure to get your attention.
Pique Their Curiosity
We are all nosy and it’s hard to ignore subject lines that sound intriguing or only tell part of the story. Using “…” at the end of your subject line will also work.
The idea here is simple. You want them to click and open the email to find out what the heck you’re talking about or how the story ends.
Frankly, the best tip when it comes to crafting compelling subject lines is to keep a swipe file of examples that got you to open the email.
For a high-level tool, you can run your subject line through the tool to test the subject line of your email.
This is how I do it when sending out work emails. If I put something that pertains to the subject of window treatments, it is noticed quicker.
🙂
“Keep a swipe file of examples that got you to open the email.” What a great idea!! I have written them down here and there, and then I lose the piece of paper. But if I saved them to a file, I’d always have them. Thx!
Store them all in a tool like Evernote!
I try to do that with my blog titles.
My eMail is pretty much reserved for my clients (and friends) who already know the information I pass on is either valuable or humorous. If I marketed via eMail, this advice (which, as I said, is how I choose my blog titles, which is a marketing tool) would prove invaluable.
Thanks, Paul!
Thank you!