Crafting a Must-Read Email Subject Line
By Ross Kramer, CEO of Listrak
January 30, 2007
You wouldn’t let a high-budget ad campaign hit the press without a compelling headline. But many marketers overlook the importance of their email subject line. In a similar manner, your subject line determines whether your subscriber opens your email, deletes it, or even mistakenly reports it as spam.
As email marketing success soars, and as more marketers take advantage of this valuable communication channel, daily message volume continues to rise. While the volume of email increases, more recipients are using the subject lines of the emails they receive as their gatekeeper. This means that smart marketers must take full advantage of clever copywriting techniques to boost response.
Listrak, an integrated, self-service email campaign management solution, has served trusted clients for many years across all industries including for-profit, non-profit, educational, and municipal facilities. With this useful backstage access into what works and what doesn’t, we have devised best practice strategies that can help any marketer stay on top.
How to Push your Email Campaigns from Received to Read Status
As a marketer, you invest hours of time into every email campaign. The message you convey is extremely important to you – and to your company. Yet, when your campaign is finally launched, the only piece your subscribers may see is an instantaneous new email message waiting in their inboxes. This email arrives amid a myriad of other messages from their bosses, co-workers, friends, family members, and other organizations. It’s also possible that your important email campaign will appear alongside several spam messages.
At this moment, your subscriber has to decide whether or not they want to open your company’s email or delete it based on several factors; including the quantity of email they’ve received, the importance of other competing messages, and their own personal or professional time constraints. The entire process involved in determining whether or not to keep a message takes, on average, only about a half second. But an effective subject line can push your message from received to opened status just as quickly.
Based on years of experience and observation, we’ve identified key elements in subject lines that can improve email marketing campaign success regardless of your industry or niche. Let’s look at a few best practice techniques.
