Email Subject Lines Part 2: How to Capture Your Audience
Daniel Lack - Email
With over twelve years’ experience providing effective email marketing solutions for a range of businesses, we are well placed to provide advice on how to capture your audience with a killer subject line – or at least we like to think so…
Make them striking
Whatever you want to communicate in your subject line, try and do it in way that’s attention-grabbing, striking, concise, and clearly tells the recipient what you’re offering. Misleading subject lines lead to an immediate entry into the deleted folder.
Keep them short
Unless you’re deliberately trying to catch the eye with a truncated subject line, make sure it will comfortably fit into the allotted space in the inbox format; a good guideline is 50 characters or fewer.
Suit your audience
There is no golden rule about the most effective tone or format to use for subject lines; the key is to have your audience in mind when you’re composing them. Some audiences respond well to shocking or controversial subject lines, where others will open an email that is straight to the point and minimalist; humour works for some, but not others: know your audience and write for them, not for some arbitrary set of rules that you’ve read on a ‘how-to’ site somewhere. You can’t succeed without market research.
Base them on data
Find out what your subscribers want by sending them an incentive-driven poll or survey occasionally so you can move with the demands of your audience. Combine this with A/B testing to analyse the efficacy of one format or word arrangement over another.
Keep them fresh
Don’t keep churning out the same, stale subject lines month after month. Use a system like ours to be able to analyse your data, then reengage with inactive subscribers by offering an attractive promotion or another attention grabbing reason to engage.
Split testing
Can’t work out which subject line is going to work? Let your audience decide. Our platform allows you to send out a couple of different subject lines to a percentage of your list, and let the opens decide which one worked the best. The platform will then use the best received one to send out to the rest of your subscribers.
Oh, and don’t forget to avoid the spammy bits – lots of symbols, capitals, punctuation etc.
If you need a bit of help with your subject lines, then call one of our team. They love talking subject lines!