asaa 300x202 Pump up the volume of your email subject lines

The low cost and relative ease of using email has made it an ever more important marketing tool. This has caused the in boxes of your customers and prospects to become ever more crowded with messages competing for their attention. For this reason it is increasing important for you to take more care when developing the Subject Lines of your emails. Ten tactics can help you craft an attention grabbing subject line, leading to greater success.

1) Learn from newspaper headlines. Like email messages, newspaper headlines have to be short, succinct, and catchy. As for headlines, subject lines should clearly state what your reader can expect from your email, what they will gain from reading them and what you want them to do as a result.

2) Concentrate on the objective. Of course you want recipients to open your message, but that’s not your ultimate objective. Do you want them to place an order? Request a catalogue? Visit their local outlet?  You must determine what that one action is, and make sure all components of your email, especially the subject line are focussed on this objective.

3) Leverage the “from” line. Do not assume your recipient know who you are. Include your company name in the “from” line and if possible perhaps the purpose of the business. A message from “Smith & Jones Gift Hampers” will usually have a higher open rate than one from “Smith & Jones Ltd”. This also means that you’re using the company name in the “from” line so you don’t have to repeat it in the subject line, offering you more characters to work with.

4) Mention key information first. Consider what you want recipients to do when they see your email and then put what you think will get them to do it front and centre in your subject line. Bear in mind that most email preview panes allow just fifty characters, including spaces, to be immediately visible. Make sure you keep within these boundaries.

5) Use Personalisation. You can personalise greetings as well as the actual offer or within text of the message based on the recipients’ past purchases or interests. Properly implemented, personalisation boosts open rates. Erroneous personalisation, or misspelling the recipient’s name, for instance, will damage not only response but also their impression of your brand.

6) Add a sense of urgency. Successful marketers use this tactic.  “Order by 18 July”, “Be one of the first 25 respondents…”, “Only 24 hours left…” are examples of messages with a sense of urgency. It is not necessary that the offer will actually close.

7) Lead, but don’t mislead. You already know this, of course, but it bears repeating. Never promise something you can’t deliver, and never make an offer in the subject that is has so many caveats in the message that the offer is all but impossible.

icon cool Pump up the volume of your email subject lines Don’t shy away from “free”. Conventional wisdom held that including the word “free” in a subject line was a sure-fire way to have your email blocked by spam filters. However, this is not usually the case, and “people still respond to the word ‘free’, so the increase in orders or other actions will almost always outweigh the messages lost to filtering. To help get through spam filters don’t make “free” the first word of the subject line, don’t use exclamation marks and don’t write in full caps.

9) Plan for deliverability. Emails that don’t get delivered cannot be opened. Look for trends in your rejected returns and use credible software and service providers.

10) Test. For all your activity test different scripts, measure your success and failure and learn from analysis of the results.

Incoming search terms:

  • ebay buy sell (different name)
  • ebay opening 2 shop with 1 account
  • selling baby products on ebay

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • • •

Filed under: How to guides

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!