Get ‘em Through the Door: eMail Subject Lines to Increase Open Rates

Let’s say you’re jumped while you’re passing by an alley. Muggers beat you up, take your wallet and phone, kick you in the ribs, and book it before you can so much as scream for help. You limp home and crawl into bed after a quick, confused call to the police. These things usually go unsolved, they tell you. Don’t expect much.

Then the next morning, you wake to find the muggers chatting about box gardens and making you an omelette in your kitchenette. I mean, it’s touching, but it’s probably not going to change your opinion of them.

You only get one chance to make a first impression, and it’s the same with email marketing. Sender and subject line are as close to a guaranteed read as you’re going to get, and they’re the only shot you have to hook a lead and draw them into the email.

Here’s how you get a lead’s attention.

Keywords

A good subject line is tailored to its target audience. At t4me, we see hundreds of emails every month flooding into inboxes with no real direction or intent. Every subject line, every banner ad, every headline has a purpose: to get the consumer interested and to provoke a click, a read, a purchase, and to help it achieve that purpose you’ve got to make sure that it’s appealing to the people seeing it. News junkies want politics and world events, movie fiends want box office rankings and hot reviews, and marine biologists want to read about whales and kelp. You’re probably not chasing the marine biologist market, but the point stands. You’ve got to give people what they want in order to draw them into deeper engagement.

Source: umminc.com

Keywords should populate the subject line, but they should also be present throughout the body of the email or newsletter. These pieces of copy aren’t just sales patter, they’re an overture toward a relationship between reader and brand. Boosting the number of qualified opens your emails get is one of the easiest ways there is of giving your overall health as a business a shot in the arm.

Urgency

A sense of urgency strengthens a subject line by manufacturing a fear of missing out in the reader. Mentions of sales and promotions can draw interest, especially if a time frame is established. While it won’t do to bang the drum too hard, say by claiming lives are at stake, a little bit of incentive to act quickly is always good.

Source: forbes.com

Brevity

Brevity, as the Bard says, is the soul of wit. If you can’t communicate your email’s voice and personality in the space of a subject line, you aren’t trying hard enough. Success is subjective, but the best subject lines impart a sense of the person behind the copy, an image which makes readers much more likely to open an email and read through it. Try playing around with your copy and seeing what feels natural. There’s an element of gut instinct you’ll have to learn to trust.

There’s no magical formula for boosting your open rate. Sometimes people will read what you write and sometimes you’ll wind up in the spam filter, and the truth is that most of the time you’ll never know the reason it fell out that way. What matters is giving your best effort to making that initial impression, and that once you see something working, you hammer the hell out of it and never stop making it better, testing each new tweak and change.

Overall, the point here is that you want people to remember you as someone who’d make them an omelette, not some shady character hanging around in an alley.