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Guidelines To Write Email Subject Lines that Make People Stop, Click, and Read

12/01/2015 6:30 AM by Admin in Email marketing


Guidelines To Write Email Subject Lines that Make People Stop, Click, and Read

If you want to make your email marketing a success then you must have to give a special attention to your email subject lines, because they will decide if your subscribers want to really open it and actually wants to spend time reading it. It’s your foremost duty to make your email subject lines compelling and interesting.

 

It’s really important that you tempt your subscribers via your email subject lines so they actually want to click it further and ultimately go for your call to action links.

Let’s start and see some important elements of captivating subject lines are and more importantly what subject lines will actually work for your specific audience.

 

General Guidelines –

For Effective Email Subject Lines:

You have to understand that writing a compelling email subject line is an art as well as a science. Your ultimate goal is to inspire people through your email subject lines so that they are bound to open and read your emails.

You have to think out of the box, yet related to your message and write the email subject line accordingly.

You must think of your subject line as a headline of your online content, so give it your best and make it best to make your recipient curious enough so he keeps on reading it.

If you are a newbie and don’t have an idea how to write compelling subject lines, then here are mentioned some of the guiding principles.

 

Must Have Of Your Email Subject Lines:

It should be like a summary- the standard is 5 to 10 words.

It must make your reader curious, so your reader cannot help himself and should read it urgently.

Don’t ever try to cheat your readers – so if you don’t want your subscribers to unsubscribe then never misinterpret your email content.

You should know your readers enough – write thought provokingly messages.

It should be clear to your reader as what will they get out of this (make it beneficial for them ultimately) – they must have an idea as if they are getting any new good material to read or it will give them limited time 50% discount.

It’s still a question whether you should add personalization to your emails or not.

It’s still not clear whether it will be good to customize subject lines with your recipient names or actually not.

You have to test yourself and see if personalization works for you or not – Mostly email service providers offer this service.

You have to collect people’s names through your opt-in forms if you want to try personalization otherwise there is no way.

It will be good to keep checking and reviewing your list names (it will be a shame if your recipient sees “Sign up today, [NAME ERROR]”) in his email subject line.

You can find out if personalized subject line works for your community readers or not, only if you give it a try and see what results you get.

 

How to Generate Winning Ideas:

You can create best effective subject lines via brainstorming. Brainstorming is a must to do before you send any new email.

To brainstorm ideas – you can set a timer for 10 minutes and start writing on any paper or use an online document and just keep writing and thinking. 

Repeat the timer of 10 minutes and try again to brainstorm. Make yourself write same amount of headlines that you wrote in the previous session. If you have written 10 headlines previously then try to write at least 10 headlines again second time as well.

In the end, you can choose the one you are going to use for your email. If you cannot decide just one, then there is no harm to go for 2 or 3 which you can use for split testing of your subject lines.

 

How To Know What Your Subscribers Want:

If you want to improve your email subject lines, then Split-testing can be quite handy.

In split testing, you will send one subject line to one part and the other subject lines to another part, track both of the emails and see which one is actually doing better.

It’s up to you how to measure the performance but usually links clicked sales generated, open rates or combination of all these considered for measuring it.

If you want to know more about how to implement a split-testing campaign, then it will be good to ask and consult your email service provider’s base or tech team.

 

What To Consider When Testing Your Email Subject Lines:

Personalization vs. no personalization (Personalization mean to include your recipients’ name in your subject line)

To go for the short or long subject lines

To use specific or general language

How to convey the same thing in different ways (for example, you can try the term “Why you should dream bigger” against “Are you dreaming big enough”)

To try Title case or just capitalize the first letter of the first word which is called sentence case.

Split testing your subject lines will show you what your audience likes and cause them to take action – It will show you the right direction to take action.

If you focus on how to increase opens and clicks on your emails, then definitely you will come up with better ideas how to actually craft your subject lines.