Subject Lines

How well the audience of an email marketing campaign receives any particular mailing will determine everything about success. As you know, the first inkling anyone has of your email is when the subject line appears on the monitor. So we can help you out by offering a couple of solid tips on subject lines.Email marketing can be super-profitable, but you need to be able to get “your stuff” opened with effective subject lines. You need to be able to craft subject lines that work, so we’ll present some nifty subject line tips designed to help you.Email marketing can do wonders for your online business, but there are certain things that you need to keep in mind, such as the subject line. In this article there are going to be a few tips that will teach you how to create high conversion rate subject lines for your e-mail campaigns.If you’re an aspiring email marketer who wants to learn about creating effective subject lines, then you’ve reached the right place. We’re going to talk about email subject line tips that are battle-tested and proven in the trenches – get ready.Just as a headline is critical for a sales letter, an email subject line is similarly critical for an email. So with that said, we’ll talk about three proven tips to writing email-reading subject lines.

The use of giving away a gift for free has found many uses within online marketing and that includes subject lines. One of the reason there is a hesitation with using the (free) word in a subject line is that some feel they may viewed upon with some negativity. But still, just about everyone loves getting something for free, and using it in a subject line can still have a powerful effect on your readers. However, there are still ways to get your point across if you just cannot bring yourself to use the F word in the subject line. Zero cost to you, or maybe even ‘no cost’ or ‘zero price’ would do the trick quite nicely. Those will do just fine because you are not misleading anyone, and they simply work to accomplish the same thing. In fact, it could prove to be highly effective, and giving away free stuff to your list will always increase the value of it and help your subscribers trust you more. The only way to find out is to test it, but you don’t have to mail it out to your entire list, right?The first important rule of writing a subject line that gets a high response is to personalize it. It’s understandable that a newer marketer may not know about it, but if you are aware of it then you simply must use it all the time. While it may not be as powerful as it once was, years ago, it still has a positive effect and helps to get your emails read. It’s always good to use every ethical angle you can because it’s a tough job commanding the attention of your readers. You’ll need to do all you can to gain a foothold for people’s attention in their inbox, so that’s why you need to do this. The first name is all you need to use because using both doesn’t sound friendly and informal. Overdoing this may kill the response that you get, which is why you need to maintain a balance between the personalization that you do and the overall feel of the email.Think of your subject line as a headline, where you have to grab the prospect’s attention no matter what. Your subject line is not a regular line in which you can write whatever you like especially if your goal is e-mail marketing. This is why you need to outline a major benefit in your subject line so that the receiver understands what to expect from the mail. Every email you send out should have a big benefit for the prospect and this should act as unique selling point or a USP. Getting people to read the e-mails you send out to your subscribers is hard enough–it is impossible if you don’t have a legitimate reason for them to do so.

Every single person you send an e-mail to is going to want to know what kind of motivation they should feel to open your letters. This is the reason that so many new e-mail marketers fail. These guys try to compose a mysterious subject line to show that there is something hidden inside the mail but it needs to be the opposite. There will be times when you’ll have to write a subject line that invokes curiosity but even in such cases, it always pays to have your USP clearly defined and given there and then. Your e-mail’s subject line is what will determine if the recipient will open the mail at all, so make sure you give it the right attention.You can get ideas for email subject lines in lots of places such as emails you’ve done before, or emails from various lists you subscribe to. You will also be able to measure your degree of improvement, but you can also get that from your conversion rates, too. You’ll quickly be able to identify weak areas and also how you dealt with them, if you have. If you want to crank out higher quality subject lines, then just learn about how to do it plus practice. If you want to improve your writing, then learn to view it with dispassionate disconnect so you can judge it for what it is. Besides that, in order to grow as an email marketer, it’s important to keep a track of everything. There are a lot of things you can do to improve your subject lines, and this one is just something that helps.You can get a free little education about subject line creation from your local newspaper. If you really want to go out there and write subject lines that really grab attention and get emails opened, then you have to start reading newspapers more diligently and study the headlines. Why? The reason is simple; these headlines are created by professional journalists with lots of experience. Those writers are competent at what they do, and they know that their headlines have to draw a passer-by into their articles. So in a way, they are an expert at writing email subject lines, it’s just that they use the skill for something else. As you read, or study them, you’ll notice different patterns or objectives such as creating suspense, mystery, giving just enough information but not the whole story, etc. When you skillfully address the reader’s emotions in your subject lines, the natural tendency is to follow the urge to read the email. So go out there and read as many newspapers and magazines as possible because once you get a hang of it, there’s absolutely no looking back. When you write your subject lines, just be straight and honest with them. Write it in such a way that people will immediately know what the email is all about. When people read your subject line, you want them to feel comfortable that they know what to expect. We’ve seen it plenty of times whereby the actual email content was not what we were expecting by reading the subject line. Perhaps one good exercise is to learn, which you’re doing now, study other emails written by marketers, and then practice writing your own.

Creating and playing on the sense of urgency is a time-tested and extremely effective technique with sales copy which includes email copy. The reason urgency works so well is because people hate losing out on something potentially good. If you are lying about why it’s urgent, people will tend to see that because they’ve seen it before so many times. If you want to use urgency, then the best approach is look at your own offer and product and go from there. Take a good look at the kinds of emails you receive, how many times do you see the same things being said over and over. Avoid embarrassment, and unsubs, by limiting your use of certain kinds of urgency tactics – think ahead. So go ahead, experiment with this simple tactic and see how the response grows overtime.

Having a lot of people open your mail does not automatically mean that your subject line was good. It doesn’t necessarily mean that your main goals are met and that your mails will convert into sales. A lot of the time a subscriber will open your e-mail simply because he is curious about what you are saying but that doesn’t mean that he will buy what you are selling.

They might simply close the mail as soon as it is opened and that is why you need to measure the click through rate as well as the rate of opening. This should give you a pretty good idea of what has been working and what has not been working.

One really cool and effective strategies when you email your list is to carry on the conversation with them. In other words, it’s about connecting your subject line to the body of your email in such a way that the flow is constant. One tactic is to write the subject line, but leave off the second half of the train of thought, and then just pick it up in the first line of the email. This can be used in practically any email, but you don’t want to overuse it. Curiosity can be immensely powerful, and that’s what is going on in this subject line approach. This is nothing new, but it is effective, and the success of it rests very much with what is written – not just using the technique. Have you ever read a teaser, and the rest was left out but you couldn’t wait until you found out what the rest was? That’s what we’re talking about.There are some general guidelines, but no real formula to follow for writing headlines or subject lines. You need to look at the audience you’re addressing, what market they’re in, as well as other factors. For example, the subject line you used to create an email about “dog training” won’t work for another niche about “fishing”. That is why we mentioned about avoiding a template approach to headlines and subject lines. You’ll find a few examples of famous subject lines, but then the only thing you can do is adapt from them and seek inspiration. Patience with yourself and diligent practice is the realistic approach to improvement.

All experienced marketers will tell you how important it is to test, and that is one way to check your own emails. You’ll know what you can and cannot do with your list, and you’ll actually get to know them better. It’s simple, get started on it right away because what you’re doing is optimizing your email campaigns for higher profits. There are some very excellent email writers out there, so just find the big names in IM and then join their lists. Then, it’s easy – study all they do because you can learn a lot from them. The take away is to test, and be sure you do it and get started, now.Another concern all email marketers have to deal with are spam filters. Spam filters work on the idea that certain words indicate the possibility of spam, and if your emails have too many of them… boom – in the spam filter. The best approach is to study a list of spam filter trigger words, and after you write each email you can test it with a spam filter. Only you can do this, and you just have to assume responsibility for the success of your emails.You should make sure that your subject line syncs up with your “from” line. This is because there is a lot of spam being sent and most people want to know exactly who is sending them e-mail.

Doing this will help increase the rate at which your e-mails are read because there won’t be any mystery about who has sent your mails to your recipients. Sometimes people forget which lists they have subscribed to so you need to make sure that they can clearly associate the “from” line with your subject lines.Write your subject line, or lines, and then just relax and see how it feels on you, see how it makes you think and feel. If possible, imagine you are the reader and look at it from that perspective. Does it have the must open – must read feel to it? If you feel the kinds of emotions you want others to feel, then good job; but if not, then back to the writing board. Don’t forget that you can always test it by mailing it out to a smaller number of people. What you’ll be doing is optimizing your email copy, and that is exactly how you craft a winner in the end. Just keep doing this and you can develop a sort of instinct for knowing what has a high likelihood of working.Don’t be afraid to test your subject lines as well as conceptual ideas and strategies. There have been so many instances of marketers having no luck, and then they test different tweeks to their copy and boom – success. No worries, though, because most marketers take a little time to find a winner. As you continue to write and test, you will discover that your writing will improve. If you take the time to learn it properly, you can develop yourself into a highly successful email marketer. Every subject line you write for your email marketing campaigns will play a major role in its overall success. Never give up and always keep working to imrove, and one day you will see that it has paid off.

There’s more information available about this subject, so it’s in your best interest to educate yourself and then use the information.

All in all, email marketing can get complicated if you don’t keep the various elements in place. The subject lines of your e-mails are very important to the success of your e-mail marketing campaigns. Even when you’re sending out a simple newsletter, it’s important to focus on creating the best subject for the email in order to increase the open rate.

The subject line tips you’ve just read will work, no doubt about it, because they have worked for others. There’s always a macro-view to everything, and when you can see how everything fits and works together as a whole, well… then you’ll be better off.There are several objectives with email marketing, making money overall of course, but you want to improve your response rates. Powerful subject lines is a hugely important step to doing that. Never quit learning about this subject as well as others.