Pump up the volume of your email subject lines

 Because of its low cost and relative ease, email has become ever more important as a marketing tool—which means the inboxes of your customers and prospects are becoming ever more crowded with messages competing for their attention. That’s why you need to lavish as much care on the subject lines of your emails as you do on the message, the offer, and the overall creative. Online marketing specialist Lyris offers 10 tactics to help you craft an attention-grabbing subject line.

1) Read the newspaper. Like email messages, newspaper headlines have to be short, succinct, and catchy. And, also like headlines, “subject lines, where possible, should clearly state what your reader can expect from your email, what’s in it for them, or what you want them to do as a result of the email,” according to the Lyris white paper “Stellar Subject Lines: 10 Rules That Get Results”.

2) Focus on the objective. Yes, you want recipients to open your email, but that’s not your ultimate objective. Do you want them to make a purchase? Request a catalogue? Visit their nearby store? “Determine what that one action is, and make sure all components of your email—especially the subject line—will achieve your objective.”

3) Leverage the “from” line. Don’t assume your recipients know who you are. Include your company name in the “from” line and perhaps the purpose of the business. A message from “Smith & Jones Gift Hampers” will usually have a higher open rate than one from “Smith & Jones Ltd”. And because you’re using the company name in the “from” line, you don’t have to repeat it in the subject line, which gives you more characters to work with.

4) Mention key information first. Again, think of what you want recipients to do upon seeing your email, and then put what you think will get them to do it front and centre in your subject line. Keep in mind that most email preview panes allow just 50 characters (including spaces!) to be immediately visible, so be sure that any critical words appear before the 50-character cut-off.

5) Personalise. You can personalise greetings, or course, as well as the actual offer or text of the message based on the recipients’ past purchases or interests. Properly implemented, personalisation boosts open rates. Erroneous personalisation, though—misspelling the recipient’s name, for instance—will damage not only response but also their impression of your brand.

6) Add a sense of urgency. “Order by 18 July”, “Be one of the first 25 respondents…”, “Only 24 hours left…” are examples of messages with a sense of urgency.

7) Lead, but don’t mislead. You already know this, of course, but it bears repeating. Never promise something you can’t deliver, and never make an offer in the subject but add so many caveats in the message that the offer is all but impossible.

8) Don’t shy away from “free”. Conventional wisdom held that including the word “free” in a subject line was a sure-fire way to have your email blocked by spam filters. But that’s not usually the case, and “people still respond to the word ‘free’, so the increase in orders or other actions will almost always outweigh the messages lost to filtering,” according to Lyris. But don’t make “free” the first word of the subject line, don’t accompany it with an exclamation point, and don’t spell it in all caps.

9) Plan for deliverability. Emails that don’t get delivered cannot be opened. For advice, see “Ten tips for improved email deliverability” and “Listen, respond, and increase email deliverability”.

10) Test, measure, and analyse.