The Secret Ingredients For Powerful Email Subject Lines

Your email subject lines can make or break your email marketing campaign.

Think about all of the emails your contacts are receiving every day. Will they notice yours? Will they actually like on it and see what you have to say?

One of the best ways to grab the attention of your contacts is through your email subject lines.

How are you using your 50 something characters?

Checkout the secret ingredients we've uncovered to help you craft powerful email subject lines.

Develop Email Subject Lines with 4 Ingredients

1. Keep it short and sweet

You're not writing your entire email in the subject line. There is absolutely no reason for your title to be anywhere over 100 characters and that is a stretch. A rule of thumb is 50 characters or fewer. If the title is too long, your contact won't be able to see the entire title. Therefore, they won't have any clue what your email is about. It's almost like walking into a fight blind. You have no idea what is going to happen.

This is a great statistic from Convince and Convert, 69% of email recipients report email as spam based solely on the subject line. Why would you want your contacts to report your email as spam?

A great concept to keep in mind is that the shorter your email subject line is, your email is more likely to be read.  Your contacts are receiving so many emails, they don't have time to read them all. With a longer subject line, they might go right past your email.

With the increasing number of people accessing their email on their smart phones and mobile devices these days, you might want to consider shortening the characters in your email subject line to as few as 20, so your subject will display properly.

2. Make it Actionable

Are you telling your contacts what they can do once they get to your email? Think of your email subject line as a call to action. Use verbs that grab the attention of your contacts, as well as telling them what they will expect once they land on the content of your email.

For example, which email subject line grabs your attention:

• Jeff Pelliccio at Mohegan Sun

• Meet Jeff at Mohegan Sun, For a Unique Sales Experience

The two subject lines can be interpreted completely different, when you see the first one you might just think that Jeff was at Mohegan Sun and your going to hear about his experience, but with the second email subject line, you get the opportunity to actually meet Jeff, its probably a conference or speaking engagement where he is going to help you improve your sales. Every person will read your subject lines differently and with an action word you can grab their attention.

I'm not sure about you, but one second with our Inbound Marketing Consultant Jeff and he will have you laughing and you will know everything you need to know about inbound marketing.

Keywords to make your subject lines actionable:

• Download 

• Save

• Meet

• Register

3. Make it Personal

Personalization is one of the easiest ways to provide your contacts with some sense of value. Have you ever received an email that said, Hi, Loyal Customer? I don't know about you but if I received an email like that I'm not sure if I could ever purchase items from that company again. You should always know something about your contacts, even if it is just their name. It's pretty silly when a company isn't able to address their contacts by their first name.

You should also format your email subject lines to reflect an offer or something that your contacts will want. A great way to develop personalized email content is through list segmentation. You don't want to send your contacts an offer that they've already downloaded or something that does not interest them. therefore, it is important to know what offers and pages your contacts are downloading and viewing.

How to personalize email subject lines:

• Add name to subject

• Provide something that interests that contact

4. Maintain Consistency Between Subject Line and Content

How many times have your opened an email and it had nothing to do with what has highlighted within the emails subject line? Probably once or twice. This could be the answer to why none of your contacts are actually clicking on the offers or call to actions inside.

If you take anything away from this blog article let it be this piece of advice, keep your email content and email subject lines consistent. What your subject line promises should also correspond with what is delivered within your email.

Still need some help consider using the four u approach when writing your subject lines. However, i'm not talking about "you". There are four keywords that start with the letter u, you need to utilize when developing a subject line.

Subject lines should be:

• Useful. Is the promised message valuable to the reader?

• Ultra-Specific. Does the reader know what's being promised?

• Unique. Is the promised message compelling and remarkable?

• Urgent. Does the contact feel the need to read?