15 Insider Tips to Improve your Email Marketing Subject Lines

Why are email marketing subject lines so important? Like it or not, your subscribers will judge your emails by their subject lines.

Even though email marketing subject lines are just a small part of the message, most prospects don’t even bother checking the rest of the email if the subject line isn’t interesting or alluring enough.

So follow the 15 insider tips given here to improve your email marketing subject lines. Here’s how to take your e-mail marketing a few notches higher.

Tip #1. What’s the goal behind the email? You should be clear about your goals and objectives. Clarity is at a premium in e-mail marketing. Your subject lines should be clear and focused and not use any complex or flowery language.

Tip #2. Add a personal touch to the subject lines such as personalization tokens. People like it when someone addresses them by their first name. So write your email marketing subject lines as, “Dear Michael, we wanted to share….” You get the idea!

Tip #3. One of the things you may want to do is to add preview texts to the email. Preview text tells your viewers what the email is all about. This would increase your open rate by quite a lot.

Tip #4. Keep your email marketing subject lines short and sweet, not more than 50 characters. Get your point across in as few words as possible.

Tip #5.   The key to email marketing is to make your subscribers feel good about themselves. Create subject lines such as “For our top customers only…”

Tip #6.   Avoid overusing capitalization. People are put off when someone overuses capitalization in the subject line and generally don’t open such emails.

Tip #7.   Urgency is the key to effective email marketing subject lines. Use a deadline such as “just for 48 hours!” or “Only this week!” This would create a sense of urgency and encourage your readers to act now rather than put off until much later. When they put off taking action, they are likely to forget all about it.

Tip #8.   Be clear about the benefits. If your readers have to open the email, the subject line should emphasize the benefits clearly to them. Essentially, it should make clear as to what’s in it for them, such as, “Make $1,200 a month starting today!”

Tip #9.   Avoid any boring detail. For example, “Your order is confirmed” sounds so much better when you are sending an order confirmation than “Order #73647354 is confirmed”.

Tip #10.   Send the right email at the right time with an appropriate subject line. For example, if you’re sending the email on a Saturday, the subject line should be about a weekend special.

Tip #11.   Engage your readers and arouse their interest by asking a question in the subject line, such as “Are you satisfied with your job or would you like something better?”

Tip #12.   Never make any false promises to get your email opened. This would only cause your audience to get angry at you and cause them to hit the unsubscribe button.

Tip #13.   You may want to try split testing of your email marketing subject lines or A/B testing. In fact, you may use these tests for most of your content, not just the subject line.

Tip #14.   If you can’t use personalization tokens in the email subject line, simply use “you” or “your,” so that it looks like you are addressing your subscribers directly.

Tip #15.   The last tip is to construct the subject lines so that they reflect the location of your subscriber. Location-specific subject lines do wonders for your open rate.