6 Tips For Writing The Perfect Email Subject Line

Posted : admin | On 20-04-2021



Never judge a book by its cover. It’s great advice, but when it comes to emails, not many people follow it.

An email’s equivalent of a cover is its subject line. It’s the first thing people see and for a third of people, the determining factor in whether they even open the email.

Two thirds of people also mark emails as spam based solely on subject lines.

Personalizing emails may be an extremely valuable strategy – but there are loads of other tactics you can use to encourage your subscribers into opening your emails. Tips to crafting the perfect subject line: Provoke curiosity. Convey urgency (especially when selling a product or service). Personalize your subject lines (and your emails). Plus, many anti-spam filters use the Subject lines to separate good emails from spam. So, because of a poorly written Subject the email may not even reach the recipient’s inbox in the first place. Below are the tips to write Subject lines that produce higher open and click-through rates. While you obviously know better than to turn to shady tactics like this, there can be some grey areas when it comes to deception. For example, if you are trying to share a blog post titled “10 Words to Never Say on Facebook” to your subscribers and your subject line is “10 Reasons to Never Post to Facebook Ever Again” then the email might still make it through spam filters, but may be. Remember that some email boxes are arranged to limit the subject line. Thus, leaving the keywords to the end may not allow them to be seen on a quick glance. Check if there’s a specific subject guideline. Some academics would state on their websites that email subject line should include a particular clause or sentence.

So no matter how great your email is, if you don’t have a great subject line it’ll never reach its full potential.

But how do you come up with subject lines that work? What separates a good one from a bad one?

Well in this post we’ll take you through all the various things you need to take into consideration and elements to add and avoid.

Follow this advice, and you’ll realize much better email open rates in no time.

Email Subject Line Character Limits

When coming up with subject lines, you only have so much space before email clients start cutting off your message.

If you let your subject lines get too long, there’s also a decent chance subscribers will miss the most important parts altogether.

Subject line length also strongly correlates with open rates. The fewer the number of characters, the higher email open rates are.

A Litmus study found that having between 4 and 15 characters achieves the highest open rates. Whereas having over 50 characters results in the worst number of opens.

So having shorter subject lines is key to increasing your open rates.

If you’re looking for a hard character limit to ensure nothing is cut off, unfortunately the answer varies by email client. Keep in mind however that mobile devices will usually be much more aggressive.

For example, the iPhone Mail app, one of the most popular email clients in the world, tends to cut subject lines off around 45 characters.

So while 15 characters is a good number to aim for, sometimes this isn’t enough space to get your message across adequately. In these cases, remaining under 45 characters should still display your full message.

Subject Line Best Practices

Subject lines exist to inform your subscribers of the content of the email. This is something you should always keep in mind when writing them.

That said, they don’t need to be a dry clinical summary of your email. There’s plenty of scope to create engaging subject lines that people on your email list can’t help but click.

Achieving this requires a bit of creativity on your part, but by simply following the guidelines below you’ll well and truly be on your way.

Personalization

Hyper-targeting is crucial in digital marketing today.

Long gone are the days where you could simply blast out the same message to everyone. People expect personalized content.

Email marketing is no exception. Personalized emails result in over a 50% increase in customer satisfaction and receive 30% higher email open rates.

To ensure this success for your campaigns, it always helps to also personalize your subject line.

This isn’t just about including your email subscriber’s first name either. Rather also communicating that the entire email has been personalized to your subscriber.

Achieving this is obviously much easier when the content of the email is also personalized.

A good example are abandoned cart emails. These lead themselves well to subject lines like “{{name}}, don’t forget about {{product}}!” This grabs the subscriber’s attention and immediately lets them know the email is tailored to them.

So just as you should be sending targeted emails, remember to keep your subject lines personal too.

Clarity

Just to reiterate: the entire point of subject lines are to let people know what’s in the email.

Don’t forget about this or deliberately make your subject lines vague in the hope of people clicking through just to know what you’re on about.

More descriptive subject lines receive higher open rates. So if you’re not being clear, people will simply ignore your email altogether.

For email campaigns that you send on a regular basis, such as personalized product recommendations, you should also keep subject lines fresh.

SmartrMail makes this easy with the rotation tool that lets you use multiple different subject lines on a rotational basis.

Repeatedly sending the same subject line will only fatigue your email list and cause them to ignore your email.

Spark Subscribers’ Interest

In addition to being clear and letting people know what the email is about, you also want to hold a bit back to spark people’s curiosity.

While these might seem like competing demands, they’re not. Consider the following examples:

  • Our Newest Ebook
  • 10 Most Common Tax Time Mistakes
  • Behind the Scenes at our Factory

These subject lines are descriptive while still being clickable.

Just like how emails filled with personalized content make personalized subject lines much easier, creating interesting content helps with enticing subject lines. So next time you want to send an email newsletter, make sure your content marketing game is on par.

CTAs

Calls-to-actions are powerful.

Including one in the body of your email can increase click through rates by 371% and your conversion rate by up to 1,617%. So why not include a CTA in your subject line as well?

Granted you’re working with a very limited number of characters, but if you can fit one in, it’s worth doing. If it doesn’t make sense though, or adding one will make your subject line far too long, then don’t force one in.

Time Sensitivity

Whether it’s email opens or sales, time sensitive offers are a great way to boost your conversion rate.

Including such an offer in your subject line can result in 22% higher open rates. Even just including the word “tomorrow” is able to increase open rates by 10%.

The email below demonstrates this tactic well.

Letting the recipient know that there’s only three hours left until the offer expires forces them to act.

Unless they want to miss out on the offer, they need to open the email as soon as they see it. This prevents them from intending to read the email later but only to forget about it entirely.

Time sensitivity isn’t the only way to achieve this.

6 tips for writing the perfect email subject lines

6 Tips For Writing The Perfect Email Subject Line Examples

You can also take advantage of people’s FOMO with scarcity. Doing so also compels people to open your email quickly. Subject line examples of this include:

  • 7 seats left. Don’t miss out!
  • Act Now: Limited Stock Remaining!
  • The chance for tickets to NAMB19

Newsletter Subject Line Examples

Now that you know how to go about writing subject lines that work, it’s time for some inspiration.

The following examples are subject lines for email marketing campaigns that have worked well. Feel free to use them as inspiration for your own campaigns.

  • “We Like Being Used” – The Muse
  • “Deals That Make Us Proud (Unlike Our Nephew, Steve)” – Groupon
  • “What The Eat In Prison” – Thrillist
  • “Vanilla or Chocolate?” – Brooklinen
  • “I didn’t see your name in the comments!?” – Kimra Luna
  • “Learn a language with only 5 minutes per day” – Duolingo
  • “Stop wasting money on ink” – HP
  • “Since we can’t all win the lottery…” – Uber
  • “Meet your new jeans” – Topshop
  • “Products the celebs are wearing” – Sephora
  • “Don’t Open This Email” – Manicube
  • “You’re missing out on points.” – JetBlue
  • “As worn in the World Tour” – Rapha
  • “Stop wasting time on mindless work” – Evernote
  • “Yes, this is a fundraising email” – Al Franken
  • “Hey” – Barack Obama

That last subject line, “Hey”, is one of the best subject lines ever for open rates.

Obama’s relationship with supporters on this email list is likely quite different to the relationship you have with your subscribers. So while this may not work as well for you, it still demonstrates that short, simple subject lines tend to perform well.

How Not to Write Subject Lines for Email Marketing Campaigns

In addition to following the steps above, there are a few things you’re better off avoiding. This includes:

Spelling Mistakes

This is an obvious one, but always remember to use a spellchecker. While most good emails apps will have spellcheckers built into them, don’t rely on them having one.

6 Tips For Writing The Perfect Email Subject Line Example

Spellcheckers aren’t 100% perfect either. They don’t always pick up subtleties in grammar or regional variations. This can also lead to perfectly cromulent words and expressions being flagged as wrong.

Annoying Punctuation

Including excessive punctuation such as multiple exclamation and question marks will only make your emails appear spammy.

The same applies to writing your subject lines in all caps. While you might be able to get away with a word or two all capitalized, having every word in all caps is like shouting at your subscribers.

Too Many Emojis

Emojis can be a great way to make your subject lines stand out in people’s inboxes. That said, if you’re going to use them, limit it to just one or two.

Filling your subject line with too many emojis is like using excessive punctuation. If you manage to avoid the spam folder, sure you’ll stand out, but you’ll also annoy your subscribers.

If you want to use emojis, check out our emoji for email subject lines post.

–

All of these points come down to one thing: don’t be annoying.

If you’re looking for more things to avoid, we’ve also written a more comprehensive guide on how not to write your subject line for ecommerce.

Looking for More Subject Line Examples?

If you’re looking for more inspiration, we also have blog posts full of great subject line examples for the following events:

We also have lists for certain types of emails, including:

There are only so subject line examples you can look at before you have to start writing on your ones though. Once you have some in mind, you can help ensure that you’re sending the best version with A/B testing. This helps ensure you get your emails opened as often as possible.

Best of luck with writing your subject lines!


Just as writing great headlines can attract more readers to your blog, a well-written email subject line can increase the number of subscribers who will actually open your email messages.

Here are my top tips for crafting email subject lines that won’t get ignored.

Keep it short

In most browsers, email subject lines are cut off after about 60 characters. Mobile devices allow for even fewer characters, so try to make your point in under eight words. You may even find that a subject line with only one or two words stands out in most people’s cluttered inboxes.

I regularly check my emails on my mobile phone. I recently received the email below:

As you can see, the subject line is far too long. I am being asked to try a bag containing a mystery product. The subject line is doing nothing to make me want to find out more, so I choose to ignore this email.

However, if you look at the same email message when opened on a desktop computer, I have a completely different user experience. I like coffee. I can try a bag of freshly roasted Pact Coffee for just £1. I’m going to open the email and find out how I can claim this amazing offer.

With 66% of emails being opened on a smartphone or tablet, and with mobile traffic growing year on year, the importance of subject line length should not be underestimated.

Ask a question

Asking a question in your subject line gets your recipient thinking. Think of it as a means of starting up a dialogue that can only be continued through opening your email to find the answer. For best results, try asking questions that target the sort of problems your customer or prospect is likely to encounter, and for which they need a solution:

  • Do you want to improve your email open rates?
  • Local knowledge panel not showing on Google?
  • Is your website ‘mobile friendly’?

These types of subject lines are effective, as the recipient can relate to them and are drawn to the prospect of learning more. Just make sure you don’t forget to answer the question in the content of the email.

Set expectations

Use your subject line to let recipients know what they can expect to see when they open your email.

  • Use lists – 3 ways to improve your email open rates
  • Create ‘how to’ or ‘tips’ emails – how to improve your email open rates
  • Highlight offers – get your free email marketing benchmark report

A key part of this is to also make sure your subject line is relevant to the content inside the email. Always deliver on your promises. If you say there are three tips in the subject line, include three tips in the copy!

Use humour

6 Tips For Writing The Perfect Email Subject Line For A

Humour is a great tool to drive open rates and get your subscribers to engage with your content. Here are some great examples of how humorous subject lines have been used that you can use as a source of inspiration.

A few warnings, though, when using humour:

  • Don’t be offensive
  • Don’t lose your company voice
  • Use it sparingly – it’s only one of many subject line writing techniques

Create a sense of urgency

6 Tips For Writing The Perfect Email Subject Lines

These types of subject lines encourage recipients to act now. FOMO, the fear of missing out, is a great way to build excitement and drive email opens. The most popular way that a lot of organisations do this, is by including words and phrases such as:

  • Last Chance
  • Today Only
  • 24 Hour Deal
  • Exclusive

You can see some examples of how some of the organisations I am a customer of have employed this tactic to make their emails stand out in my inbox:

Get personal

Personalisation is a great way to increase open rates. According to an Experian Email Marketing study, emails with personalised subject lines have 26% higher unique open rates. You can personalise your subject lines by either using the recipient’s name, or the recipient’s company’s name. The image above, again, highlights how EE and Amazon use this tactic to drive email opens:

Rainu meet our best ever offer for iPad Mini

Rainu Bhele: Free Kindle Book

Tread carefully when it comes to personalisation. If your email database does not feature your customers’ most up to date details, you might find personalisation has a detrimental effect on your open rates.

Conclusion

These tips are just some of the ways that you can increase your email open rates. But as vital as it is to encourage people to open your emails, it’s even more important to ensure that, once they’re in, they like what they see. Even if your email subject lines are absolutely irresistible, if you consistently deliver underwhelming content, your customers will lose interest.

Use good subject lines in conjunction with high quality, relevant content to keep your open rates consistently high, and drive more conversions.