In today’s fast-paced world, email overload is a reality. From prospects to contacts, everyone’s inbox is bombarded with unlimited email communications, and what all of them are competing for? The recipient’s attention.
When we talk about email marketing, subject lines play a crucial role in deciding whether the recipient opens an email, ignores it, or worse yet, marks it as spam.
The first milestone of a successful email starts with a subject line; the rest of the milestones are useless if the subject line fails to grab your recipients’ attention. Good subject lines are often descriptive – explain what the email is about – or personal enough to solve a query of the potential user.
The subject line should be catchy enough to give people a reason to check out your content.
What Makes Subject Lines So Important?
With most digital content, a subject line wins the heart of the reader. It should strike a balance between informing, intriguing, and inducing people to click, ensuring you’re not over or under-promising on what’s inside.
Those that don’t represent what’s inside are judged accordingly; around 69% of recipients mark emails as spam based on subject lines.
The strength of your brand lies in the body of the email, but at the end of the day, the email-opens rate always depends on the subject line. Therefore, to grab your customers’ attention, powerful, funny, or otherwise, interesting email subject lines are a must.
The right subject line should:
- Outline the reason for opening up/discarding the email
- Define the purpose of the email
- Tell recipients what the email is about
- Push the customer to buy a product or to avail of the promotion being sent in the email
- Highlight the critical aspects of the email
How to Write a Personalized Subject Line
There are several general guidelines/tactics for crafting impactful subject lines; here are the three most important ones to incorporate into your emails, and they will dramatically improve the ROI of your email marketing campaign.
First thing first…
Pique & Segment their Interest
No matter how homogenous they are, different customers subscribe to your newsletter for a different reason – some of them might want to know about your deals, while others like your content style.
It means a subject line that might convince one reader-mix might not work for your entire audience to open your email.
Creating interest-specific subject lines gets easier once you know who attracts what; don’t forget the final goal. Your subject line should be exciting and unique.
The best practice is to avoid overused fancy words and clichés and give your audience a hook that captures their attention and incentivizes them to learn more about your offering by opening the email.
Keep it Short and Concise
A typical inbox reveals only 60 characters of an email’s subject line. On a mobile phone screen, it is just 25 to 30 characters that take around six to eight words.
Around 59% of Millennials and 67% of Generation Z use their smartphone to scan their inbox, which means you should come up with a mobile-friendly subject line, meaning it contains no longer than a few words. Longer subject lines will get ignored due to being not visible entirely.
The subject line should precisely communicate what the email is about so that the recipient can set their email’s priorities without opening all the emails.
So, use the precious space of the subject line precariously, don’t load it with unnecessary words like “hello,” “thank you,” etc., which can easily be included in the body, the experts said.
Always Test your Subject Lines
Using the principle of A/B testing, write subject lines that appeal to different audiences; here, the choice is all yours, whether to target your entire audience altogether or target them separately.
Though it’s difficult, you can create a subject line that can work across all the niches of your target profile.
Some email marketing platforms allow you to split test or A/B test your emails, where you provide two versions—or sometimes more—of the same email, and the best-suited will be selected by the platform.
And here’s the most basic test is… which email got a high open-rate? You can also measure additional variables, such as unsubscribes, who visits your website, and every minor detail/move that the recipient took while on the email.
You can constantly tweak and test your subject lines to see what resonates with your audience with the resources at hand.
Wrapping up
Nowadays, people have short attention spans, while the number of emails being received is unlimited; so, the only catch in winning the readers’ attention is the subject line. This first-impression creating element helps readers whether to open the email.
So, what if your greatest offering goes unnoticed just because of a dull subject line of your email strategy?
It would be a significant loss.
To break the clutter, to make them open your email, always go for a personalized, quick, catchy, and straightforward subject line.
