Email campaigns is an integral part of any Marketing campaign. However, how does one ensure that the emails reach the target consumers inbox and is read? Effective email subject lines are a must. Here are some tips that will help you create a superb email subject line:
Step 1: Avoid these 3 Words in your Email Subject Line
A study conducted by MailChimp (http://eepurl.com/cviIL) found that Help, Percent off, and Reminder will have a negative effect on open rates with your end consumer . Avoid these at all costs. Instead, try different words to replace these. Consult your thesaurus today to find words that mean the same thing, but are not these exact words.
Step 2: Avoid personalization by name, but localization helps
MailChimp also discovered that a newsletter personalized by location (ex. City name) was opened much more than newsletters personalized by recipient name (http://eepurl.com/cviIL). Why is this? Different locations have different cultures or different ways of life. Attacking this or specializing the email subject lines to include something about the location brings our pride with the people of that city. Besides, it’s time saving compared to personalizing each email by each recipient.
Step 3: Newsletter Email Subject Lines
When distributing newsletters, distributors like to provide some continuity from month to month. However, in doing so, recipients tend to stop opening these newsletters over time. How can one safe guard against that? By providing an interesting title that is associated with the new content. This will let the recipients know that yes, this is another newsletter, but check out the new activities that have been going on! By providing a customized email subject lines to each newsletter, this will help to maintain the high open rates that you have come to expect.
Step 4: Keep Email Subject Lines Short and to the Point
This is a highly debated topic, but the general consensus is to keep email subject lines to 50 characters or less (http://eepurl.com/cviIL). This allows the end user to easily see what the email is on their mobile device, and to easily distinguish if they wish to open it or not. However, some targeted marketing campaigns found that their readers preferred the additional information in the email subject line. Again, these tips are general, it all depends on who your recipients are and what business you are in.
Step 5: Email Subject Lines and “From:” should Connect
Although these are seperate, the recipient will open more likely if they can easily distinguish who the email is from. The email subject lines may be intriguing, but if they do not recognize the sender, they will not open it (scared it may be a virus). Make sure in your subject line that the user can see who it is from and try to connect the sender to that subject line. See below for an example:
Notice how in the email subject line, it says “DECA”, and the sender is “DECA U Guelph”? The email subject line and sender are properly connected and the recipient will feel safe opening this email.
Step 6: Do Not Send too Frequently
Although you may have effective subject lines, but send your emails or promotional emails to frequently, the open rate will slowly decrease. This is because the end user feels as though you are spamming there inbox with content that at first is useful, but then becomes annoying, and frustrating. You can have perfectly effective email subject lines but if you do not schedule appropriately, recipients will stop opening these emails. (http://eepurl.com/cviIL)
These are just a few basic tips in order to get you started on drafting effective email subject lines. For further information or examples, check out MailChimp’s informative article (http://eepurl.com/cviIL). Email subject lines are crucial for a successful email marketing campaign and we hope you take some of these steps into effect to increase your open rate.
