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It may surprise you to know, but a catchy email marketing software campaign subject line is not always the most effective technique to getting your email marketing campaign opened by your subscribers. The most effective email marketing campaign subject lines are straight forward and to the point, and directly pertinent to the information contained within your email. As a business owner or operator, learning the best practices to getting your subscribers to open their emails is crucial. The more people that open your emails, the more customers you will gain, and the more sales you will make based on the contents of your message.
It is important to know what your message is to your customers, and how you want to develop the relationship with them through email marketing software. Although this sounds like obvious advice, statistics indicate that many email marketing campaigns are not successful because the content is not in line with what the customer was expecting when he or she signed up. For instance, a subscriber might have signed on to receive updates on new products, but is now receiving promotional emails for items in stock.
The email subject line should reflect the kind of email subscribers have asked for. If they have signed up for a newsletter, then the most effective subject lines are those that include your company name and the topic of the newsletter. If the subscriber signed on to receive promotions, then the email subject line should indicate what the promotion is. Notice that these are very straight forward: nothing cute, nothing fancy. In an email environment plagued by spam, people are skeptical of the cutesy attempts at getting people to open their emails. People trust email subject lines that deliver the straight goods. Statistics show that email marketing software subject lines that directly explain the contents of the email receive an open-rate of anywhere between 60-85%, whereas the witty, and pun-filled subject lines tend to have a subscriber open-rate of 6-14%.
Here are some other things to keep in mind when constructing your email subject line. Keep your subject line under 55 characters. Longer subject lines lose your subscriber quickly and often don't fully appear when sent. Do not use too much capital lettering or symbols like exclamation points or dollar signs in your email marketing software subject line. All these techniques, commonly used to attract attention, also end up attracting spam filters. If you overuse them, your email will not go into your subscribers' inbox, but rather into their spam or junk mail box.
The email subject line is the subscribers' first touch-point with your email marketing software campaign. Therefore, it is of the utmost importance that it is relevant to the subscriber. Too often companies that use email marketing place promotional information in the subject line for subscribers that have signed up for a newsletter. The subscriber is immediately turned away from the promotional offer, because he never signed up to receive promotions. Instead the subscriber begins to mistrust the brand or company sending the email marketing software campaign. Remember that simple and straight forward email subject lines are trustworthy and produce better results in terms of subscriber open-rates. The better the open rates, the better overall return on investment you will achieve. Your email subject line is just like anything else: you only get one chance to make a good impression!
If admission to a secret club of society can only be done with the help of a password, then subject lines are what will get a recipient of your email newsletters to open your emails. Newsletters in general are a pretty tricky business, especially if you are not actually a news service provider. Most news service providers have it pretty easy because their content is not spam and they are not trying to elicit a sale in any way. Couple this with the fact that creating a subject line is a simple matter of just copying and pasting a headline into a mail and the bulk of work is already set and done. However, if you are net entrepreneur who is using the medium of newsletters to subtly nudge the prospective customer and recipient into buying something from you, this suddenly becomes difficult. Subject lines then become the most taxing exercise of all – after all, a subject line is like a foot in the door.
The first step to writing cool subject lines is to learn from the mistakes that spammers make. Spammers are not really interested in making a sale itself but rather in just getting the email they send into the right folder and then getting the recipient to actually open it. To this end, they will use ridiculously misleading subject lines like “your credit card has expired” or “you owe me money.” Therefore, the first step is to be honest in your subject lines in your email newsletters.
Now being honest doesn't mean that you go straight to the point and say that you have a cure for alopecia at 50% off. Rather, you would be better off saying that the main content of your article is that there is now a cure for alopecia, a scientific explanation for its cure, or that scientists have finally made a breakthrough with it. The rest of your email content can take care of the subtle spiel.
The exact writing style of the subject line is something that you can probably already ascertain from what has already been said here. As you can see, there is a very “newsy” feel to the subject line. This is the way subject lines have to be written, like a news alert. In case you have many news items and there is no way that you can put everything into a subject line, the best course of action is then to simply state that this is an email from a certain website.
CAN-SPAM legislation also has some guidelines for people who send unsolicited mail with regard to the subject lines of the mail. Therefore, you need to tag your subject lines in your email newsletters with the prefix “newsletter.” Many spammers also mislead by using subject lines like this but if you are trusted sender then there is no way that you should end up in the same boat as a spammer. You could also add the recipient's name in the subject line for a personal touch.