Email marketing is at its most powerful, and is delivering the highest ROI, according to Campaign Monitor. However, the amount of effort and time dedicated to an email campaign can all be sacrificed without a strong, effective subject line.
The numbers all say that the subject line is where your audience will make their first impression of the following email, and even helps them to decide whether to open it or not. So how do you create the most effective subject line for your audience?
If you want to boost your own company's email campaigns with a few simple tweaks, here's what we're talking about...
This blog post is part of “Your Definitive Guide to Lead Nurturing” blog series.
“Eye magnet words are those that have been scientifically proven to reach out to a customer and attract the human eye.”
Since the subject line is the first piece of information that a prospect will consider in opening versus not opening an email, there is no room for error! This resource explains how to use basic principles of human psychology to grab the attention of your audience with your subject lines - all in order to optimize clicks. Read the full article to learn more about eye magnet words, trigger words, and other psych concepts to boost your email conversion rates.
“The best sales email subject lines are creative, interest-provoking, and informative without giving too much away”
Now that we understand a bit about the psychology of subject lines, let's see some effective examples. This extensive list displays what an successful subject lines look like and how they can be used based on the situation or context at hand. Whether you'd like to try some of these for your company or simply use them as inspiration for your own creation, they are sure to boost open rates!
“Generally speaking, keeping your preheader text to between 40-50 characters should give you a good amount of room to say something meaningful and compelling while still ensuring it gets shown in full on most devices”
Considering the widespread use of mobile devices, the ideal email should be formatted to make our point in a small amount of space, such as a mobile screen. For this reason, the short excerpt that shows under the subject line (also known as preheated or preview text) is incredibly important. This article explains how to craft the most effective preheader text in order to support your subject line to produce higher open and click-through rates.
“69% of email recipients report an email as spam based solely on the subject line”
To help put all of these tips and tricks into perspective, let's check out some statistics on this very topic. This infographic outlines how important a good subject line is by reporting stats derived from subject line testing. This is a must-read for anyone concerned with success rates for length, keyword use, name use, and many more aspects of subject line creation.
“A/B testing is your secret weapon to ensuring that your online experience is optimized for your business objectives”
Even given all of the best practices and tips that the world has to offer about subject lines, sometimes the best option is to simply run your own tests to figure out what your actual audience wants and needs. In this video, we learn the basics of A/B testing and how it can boost the success of your email campaigns.
“Your email marketing efforts are only as good as the emails that are getting opened”
With the amount of effort that goes into creating capturing and effective emails, it would be a shame to let that all go to waste due to a bad subject line. This comprehensive podcast outlines 5 email subject line formulas created from Porterfield's personal testing and experiences. By the end of the podcast, you are sure to understand why it is so important to put the same effort into the subject lines as we do in the entire email!
“Messages with subject lines between 1 and 20 characters in length have the highest average open rate (18.5%), unique click rate (2.4%), and click-to-open rate (12.9%)”
As they say, the proof is in the pudding. This in-depth report analyzes the findings of a study based on over 7 billion emails sent in 2017. The results help us to understand the most universal best practices (which we have a couple of articleson!), as well as keeping us up to date with the most recent trends and audience preferences. Check out the full report to see where you could be improving your subject line strategy.
Email marketing is just one part of lead nurturing, learn how to build an effective lead nurturing program by checking out our Lead Nurturing Masterclass.