9 Tips for Creating an Awesome Email Subject Line

Creating valuable content that is worth reading is hard work. But what’s even harder is creating a compelling subject line that will encourage readers to actually open your email to read the content that you spent time creating.

Creating valuable content that is worth reading is hard work. But what’s even harder is creating a compelling subject line that will encourage readers to actually open your email to read the content that you spent time creating.

If readers aren’t even opening the email to read the content you spent hours creating, than your efforts and not to mention your email campaigns aren’t having much of an impact.

Here are a few factors to keep in mind when creating a compelling subject line:

1. Think KISS: Keep It Short & Sweet.

With more and more emails being opened on mobile devices, its best to keep your email subject lines short. If your subject line is too long, it will get cut off on different mobile devices. This is why we recommend keeping your subject lines under 50 characters.

2. Add names.

Let’s be honest, everyone loves the sound of their own name. Based on our own testing and past campaign success, we found that including the first name of the recipient in the subject line had higher clickthrough rates.

Here are some examples:

  • “John, we thought you might like to see this”
  • “John, just wanted to share this with you”
  • “Happy Birthday John!”

Using merge tags to automatically pull your Contacts name or other information into the subject line is a useful feature when trying to create more personalized subject lines.

3. Use a Familiar Sender Name.

With the increased amount of spam email that people are getting these days, it’s no wonder people are hesitant to open emails from unfamiliar senders.

Here are a few tips when creating your “From” name and email address:

  • Never use “noreply@companyname.com” – why would anyone reply to this email address?
  • Use a real email address that accepts responses and is being monitored.
  • Try using your full name, instead of just using the company name – comes off impersonal.
  • Or, try adding the company name at the end of your full name. For example: “John Doe, MaaS Pros”.
4. Be truthful.

The email subject line should be a really brief description of what the email entails. The subject line is essentially making a promise to your recipient about what they will read in the email itself. So to avoid being marked as spam or to avoid unsubscribes, do not try to lure your recipients with a false promise in the subject line.

5. Right on time.

Finding the optimal time to send emails is always tricky. But having that data of what time most of your recipients are opening your emails is key increasing your clickthrough rates. This is why a lot of our users take advantage of TieiT’s built-in timing chart which displays the time that you received the most opens so you can use this data for your next campaign to narrow down an optimal time for your leads and target audience.

Best Times to Open

6. Make your readers take action.

Try to include some type of “call-to-action” within the subject line itself. Subject lines that begin or have some type of action verb are a lot more enticing to click on.

Have you tried to use language that inspires people to click? Here are a few examples:

  • “Join us for our end-of-year event!
  • “Have lunch with us at our Charity BBQ”
  • “Buy your tickets now before we sell out!”

Words like, join, have and buy will encourage people to take a particular action.

7. Create a sense of urgency.

Adding a sense of urgency or deadline to your subject lines can encourage recipients to act immediately instead of putting off for later. For example, giving a deadline such as “Ends today!” or “Offer expires in 24 hours!”

8. Pose a compelling question.

Asking a question in the subject line is a great way to pique your reader’s’ interest or curiosity. Also, asking a question and not giving the answer compels readers to open your email to find the answer.

9. A/B Testing.

Some subject lines have proven to be more effective than others for a variety of reasons, but one thing to remember is that there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to subject lines.

For this reason, we highly recommend that our users test their email campaigns. And testing your subject line is one of the easiest elements to test on an email campaign.

A/B testing your email campaigns by sending out two versions of the same email but with different subject lines is going to help you figure out what works best for your target market and audience.

A:B Testing Email Subject Lines

Here are a few elements you can modify when conducting an A/B test with your subject lines:

  • Long vs. short subject lines
  • Try including numbers vs. spelling out the numbers
  • Asking a question
  • Using punctuation such as an exclamation mark
  • Personalizing the subject line with the recipient’s name

The more you test your subject lines, the more data you will gather and gain better insights into your subscribers.

These are only a few of many tips that we can give you to help you create a compelling email subject line to increase your open and clickthrough rates. The best length and type of email subject line will depend on your target market and understanding your audience. And the best way to get a better understanding of your recipients is through A/B testing but also making sure you are looking at the data.

Remember to check past subject line performance. How did they perform? Did the subject line with the question garner more opens or did the subject line with the name in it? Getting a good view of the data and analyzing it is only going to help you to create really great email subject lines that your recipients will want to open, so all that hard work you put into creating your emails will be worth it!

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