By Elmer on March 11, 2009

As a follow up to my last post about best practice email marketing campaigns a good follow up blog post would be about the details on these best practice tips. Today, it’s about e-mail subjects we use on our newsletters. In most cases, except for Gmail snippets, e-mail subject is the very first visible content our intended audience see on our message.

It helps readers decide to read it, delete it or worse mark it as spam. And they have a fraction of a second to do so. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by new messages and our e-mail finds itself at the bottom of the stack. So in order to get the attention of our readers, subject lines should be attractive enough to warrant further attention.

We sometimes blame poor delivery rates and discontinued e-mail addresses for the poor performance of our e-mail newsletter campaigns. But if we also mishandle the remaining ones whom we hope would read our message, then we can’t expect good results. Emails should have compelling subject lines, whether sending messages to clients or colleagues.

How do we define attractiveness and how do we make our subjects as such? Attractive to me could be boring to you so let’s refer to a comparison made by MailChimp regarding a group of emails with high and low open rates.

Best Open Rates (60%-87%)
Invitation from [COMPANYNAME]
Eye on the [COMPANYNAME] Update (Oct 31 - Nov 4)
[COMPANYNAME] Sales & Marketing Newsletter

Worst Open Rates (1%-14%)
It’s still summer in Tahoe!
Give a Gift Certificate this Holiday
Last Minute Gift - We Have The Answer

Subject lines with poor open rates are characterized as salesy, pushy and appear with emphasis using punctuation marks, trying to sell something or making recipients guess what’s inside. On the other hand, those with better rates look boring (honestly I find them that way), personalized and more formal format. But such “boring” but straightforward formats are what seem to work in the business. For those poorly performing subjects, perhaps spam filters took care of them even before they reached the email inbox.

As recipients vary in interests, expectations and even on the email clients they use, the more segmented our mailing list becomes, the better. For example, ClickZ provides tips on how to write effective subject lines for Blackberry users.

Successful e-mail campaigns have equally successful e-mail subjects and that boils down to how recipients perceive them. They can be deceiving or straightforward. Sometimes recipients think that your e-mail is a promotion and will only waste their time. So in order to avoid such instances of writing misleading or overpromoting subjects, here are some of the things we can do:

1. Think of subject lines as similar to newspaper headlines or AdWords ad titles.  They are brief but they are direct to the point.
2. Save space by avoiding repeats of unnecessary terms. If the “from” field uses your company name, you don’t need to repeat it in the subject line.
3. Test length of subject line. Studies show that subjects with shorter than 50 characters yield better results than those with longer lines.
4. Be aware of spam triggers. These can be special characters or words often abused and are identified with e-mail spammers.
5. Create sense of urgency by offering incentives to those who respond to your messages promptly. “Order before midnight Monday”
6. Look at your campaign performance history. Which message was your most successful and what subject line was used?

Tell, not sell, your recipients what is inside the body of your e-mail message. A good e-mail subject is just a part of the big picture. Once you take good care of it, you’ll have less obstacles to overcome.

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