With Black Friday just gone, and Christmas on its way, it’s likely that your inbox is full to bursting with marketing emails. As a marketing agency, we love receiving emails as they give us ideas and insight about how different companies promote themselves. But at times, even we admit to getting a bit emailed-out.

If you’re currently spending a lot of time deleting emails, you may assume that your customers are doing the same. This begs the question: is email marketing still worth doing?

We would argue a resounding ‘yes’ but with the caveat that it must be done well. And therein lies the difficulty!

One of the critical factors in improving your email marketing open rates is to come up with an enticing subject line.  This isn’t always easy – indeed, the subject line can sometimes take as long to write as the text contained within the email! However, get it right and you’re overcome the first hurdle in successful email marketing which delivers a return in terms of sales or sales leads.  Here are 5 top tips to consider when writing more effective subject lines.

5 tips on writing more effective subject lines

1. The role of the subject line is to encourage people to open your email. It needs to be sufficiently long to tell people what the email is about, but it must also be no more than 50 characters if it’s going to display properly on a mobile. (Mobile now accounts for more than half of web visits).
2. The text needs to summarise what the email is about but it also needs to draw out the main benefit to the end customer. Get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible, in as few words as possible. In general, subject lines which contain statistics or important numbers will do better than ones without. People tend to like timelines and deadlines – so if your sale ends tomorrow, say so, or if you’ve got 50% off certain products, include that information.
3. Use visuals to help make your subject line stand out from the crowd, if appropriate. You’ll need to test before you roll this one out, but many brands are now creating subject lines with symbols and emojis which are relevant to their message and their brand.
4. Always personalise your emails. Ideally, capture the recipient’s name when they opt in to your database but if this isn’t possible, use a personal tone by incorporating words like ‘you’ and ‘your’.

If you need help in making your email marketing campaigns work harder, please get in touch. We have a strong track record in helping a variety of companies to improve their open rates and return from email marketing.