The secrets of a perfect subject line
Recently research has shown that as many as 33% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone.*
That might represent your entire open rate!
So how can you ensure that your email subject lines are working as hard as they need to?
Here are our secrets for writing the perfect subject line:
1. Identify yourself: Be clear about who you are (and the content of your message) from the outset and you'll more quickly gain the trust and recognition of your recipients.
2. Make it actionable: Will the recipient know what he or she can do in the email? Give them a sense of excitement or curiosity, but be clear about what's in it for them.
3. Create urgency: If you're making an offer, highlight time-sensitive details to drive response, such as 'This week only' or 'Our 48-hour flash sale starts today'.
4. Highlight specifics about any savings: Use 'Save up to 40%' rather than 'Make great savings'.
5. Avoid a narrow offer focus: If only one element of your offering is featured and that element doesn’t appeal to the recipient, they will assume the whole email is irrelevant. (Of course, if you're targeting your emails effectively, this could be less of a problem!)
6. Feature benefits: Guests value extras like free upgrades, vouchers and special add-on benefits.
7. Be clear and straightforward, not teasing: Busy customers performing 'inbox triage' are not intrigued by clever copy - they want an immediate reason to open or delete your email.
8. Put the most important information up front: Subject lines can be long but pack the punch at the beginning, as it will be truncated in the inbox (even more so on mobile devices). How long should it be? Aim for less than 45 characters, but make it as long as it needs to be to convey the important information, and not one character longer or shorter.
9. Personalise with care: Personalisation that is gratuitous or just plain wrong is worse than none at all. Appropriate personalisation using details such as name or location can increase open rates, as long as it feels natural and not like an abuse of personal information.
10. Tell, don't sell: The best subject lines tell what's in the email, they don't sell what's in it.
*Research by ExactTarget/Salesforce.com
