Every email newsletter or email marketing message you send, carries a subject line. Your recipients read the subject line and make quick decisions about whether or not to read the body copy of your email message.
Here are 5 tips to improve the open rates of your email messages.
1. Deliver what you promise
Make sure you subject line adequately reflects what the user gets in the click through. The objective of the subject line is to get recipients to open your email. Once they read your email, your objective is typically to promote click-throughs to your Web site.
Your subject line should be intriguing but not misleading.
If after you’ve tested a number of variations and you still get low open and click through rates it’s not the fault of the subject line – it’s probably your offer. Writing bait and switch subject lines won’t change the eventual results either; they will just make people leery about reading your next email.
2. Match the audience
Make sure your subject line appeals to your audience. I just got an email promoting consulting services for biotech companies. We have nothing to do with that.If you have a large list, you should break your list into subsets and make a subject line separate for each subset.
3. Consider a longer subject line
Marketing Experiments provides a case study for increasing the length of the subject line. In their published case study, the clicks increased when they increased the subject line text.In their case study’s first email, the subject line read: “First Look at New Products, Technology, and More.” In this case study’s second email, the tester added the company’s name to the subject line. Results the second sending increased open rates by more than 8%.You can read more about the case study at this link.
4. Avoid SPAM subject lines
We have a new ebook on how to create effective email campaigns that includes a long list of SPAM trigger words to avoid. If you would like more information on our ebook, please contact contact@letterwell.co.
5. Always test
We provide a full chapter about testing email subject lines. You should create two slightly different versions of your email. Send one half of your list an email with one subject line. Send the other half an email with the same body copy; but include the slightly different email subject line.You can get more information on writing and testing email newsletter subject lines in our blog.