Reach more email recipients with this three-step process for writing subject lines:

1. Post your email in ChatGPT. Ask for three subject lines.
2. Test those subject lines in Omnisend’s email subject line tester. Use its suggestions for improving your subject line.
3. Choose the strongest element for the subject line. Use the others for the headline, deck or preheader.

That’s important. Because 69% of recipients mark emails spam based on the subject line.

Thank you to David Brierley of Sentry for sharing this tip. One thing I love about teaching is that I always learn from my brilliant students!

Learn my full system for writing subject lines that get opened and emails that get read, clicked and shared!

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It might be your CEO’s favorite email. Every policy wonk in D.C. sits by their inbox waiting for it to come. It’s the only newsletter I know of that has ever been covered — for formatting! — by The New York Times.

It’s Axios. And if you haven’t started stealing from it yet, started stealing from it now.
Here are four things to steal from — and one way to improve on — everybody’s favorite newsletter.

1. Report average reading time.

If your newsletter is short, you might boost readership by letting readers know.

This issue of Axios weighs in at 4.5 minutes. That would be a little long, if editors didn’t have a great formatting trick. (See No. 4.)

2. Run a short breaking news story.

This one’s one paragraph — one sentence — of 29 words long. Outwrite Axios: For clarity, chop your 29-word sentences in half.

3. Cover One Big Thing.

Email newsletter subscribers ding senders for underpromising and overdelivering. Give them less, and make it better.

Focus your newsletter on one story, and cover it well.

4. Pass the Palm Test.

Break your copy up with bullets, bold-faced lead-ins and links to make it look easier to read. The easier it looks, the more people will read it.

(And there’s your solution for the 4.5-minute newsletter.)

5. Pass the Skim Test.

Outwrite Axios: Can skimmers learn everything you want them to know about your topic — without reading the paragraphs? If so, you pass the Skim Test. If not, you need to keep working.

Axios breaks the newsletter up — but does not facilitate skimming — with emphasized words. Here’s what a skimmer would read:

Help skimmers get more from your message with a better strategy for emphasized words.

Are you ready to be loved by your recipients?

Boost open and clickthrough rates, readership and shares: Learn my full system for writing marketing emails and newsletters.

The post How to write like your CEO’s favorite newsletter appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Call it the envelope. Before they’ll open your email, your recipient considers four things: 1) the sender (or “from” name), 2) the subject line, 3) the preheader and 4) the preview pane.

If you’re just focused on the subject line, you could be ignoring 75% of the elements that could get your email opened — or deleted. Are you addressing your:

1. From line

When users review their inboxes, they look at the From line first to confirm that they recognize the sender. Then they look at the subject line to confirm that they want to open a message.

Indeed, more than two-thirds of email recipients use the From line to decide whether to open your message, according to a study by Campaign Monitor.

2. Subject line

The From line is how email recipients decide whether to delete your message. The subject line is how they decide whether to open.

Or so says Loren McDonald, chief marketing officer of J.L. Halsey, a marketing technology and services firm.

Indeed, 35% of email recipients use subject lines to decide whether to open a message, according to a study by DoubleClick. And 47% of people use the subject line to decide whether to open brand emails, according to a study by Chadwick Martin Bailey.

3. Preheader

Preheader text can have a dramatic effect on your email open and click-through rates: Some 24% of respondents looked at the preheader first when deciding whether to open an email, according to a joint survey between Litmus and Fluent.

4. Preview pane

Eight out of 10 businesspeople and more than half of consumers use preview panes to decide whether to open an email, according to Lyris Technologies.

That makes the preview pane one of the top elements desktop and laptop readers consider when deciding whether to open or delete your email message.

Are you using all of the tools at your disposal to get your message opened? If you’re just focused on your subject line, you’re ignoring 75%.

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Tick tock. People spend, on average, 11 seconds reading email blasts or updates, according to a report by Litmus.

And that’s up 7% in the last five years. (The reason for the increase? More mobile-friendly emails, says Litmus.)

One of the best email marketing strategies, then, is to write short emails. (It may be almost as important as polishing your email subject lines.)

Why so short?

Why do people spend so little time with marketing emails?

• Too many emails. Organizations and individuals send out 306.4 billion emails a day, according to Statista. That’s a lot of competition for attention in the inbox. (And that doesn’t include all of the email marketing pieces, blog posts and other content marketing pieces screaming for your readers’ attention?
• Tiny screens. Around 61% of emails are opened on a mobile device, according to Adestra. That tiny screen causes all kinds of usability problems.
• Audience and sender sophistication. As email newsletters have become shorter, more visual and more scannable, subscribers have learned to expect more tightly edited e-zines.

How long should emails be?

So how long should your email be for the best open rate? To get people to land on your landing page? Depends on whom you ask — and on what type of email you are sending.

Emails of about 20 lines of text had the highest click-throughs, according to a study of more than 2.1 million customers by Constant Contact. Twenty lines is about 200 words. See another compelling, data-backed argument for 200-word emails

The Constant Contact research also showed that 3 or fewer images get the highest click-throughs.

Sales emails of 50 to 125 words had the best response rates, at just above 50%, according to a study of more than 40 million emails by Boomerang.

How long is 11 seconds?

But before you press Send, remember that Litmus research: People average 11 seconds with emails.

So how many words is 11 seconds?

Well, people read about 200 words per minute. So figure Average Reading Time, or A.R.T., a concept created by The Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark.

To figure A.R.T., multiply the number of minutes you think people will spend reading your message by 200 words per minute. The result: your recommended word count.

We know that people will spend an average of 11 seconds — about 18% of a minute — with your email. So multiply one minute by 200 words per minute to get the recommended length of your email in words.

Also note that the percentage of emails read for more than 18 seconds grew to 44.4% in from 38.4% five years earlier.

If your email blast is in that lucky 44%, you can relax, kick back and take 60 whole words to communicate your email message.

Learn more about short emails

• What’s the best email newsletter length? [Data!]
• What’s the best email subject line length?
• To reduce email length, focus
• Ideal email length: short, but not too short
• 3 email newsletter formats that work
• What’s a good length for a concise paragraph online?
• What’s the best email readability?

___

Sources: Mike Renahan, “The Ideal Length of a Sales Email, Based on 40 Million Emails,” HubSpot, July 11, 2018

Chad S. White, “Email Attention Spans Increasing,” Litmus, March 8, 2017

“Top 10 Email Clients in March 2019,” Upland Adestra

Jason Fidler, “New Data: How the Amount of Text and Images Impact Email Click-Through Rates,” Constant Contact

Alex Moore, “7 Tips for Getting More Responses to Your Emails (With Data!),” Boomerang.com, Feb. 12, 2016

The post What is the best marketing email length? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Oh, those darling emojis: red heart, face with tears of joy, naughty eggplant. Surely they have a use in subject lines for marketing emails.

Indeed, they do, say the conservative folks at the Nielsen Norman Group.

They say emojis in subject lines can:

• Draw attention to your message in a crowded inbox
• Help communicate the topic of your email
• Add emotion and context to a message
• Even replace words — a heart for love,for instance — if used carefully

But beware. Emojis:

• Can be hard to distinguish on a desktop — let alone smartphone — screen
• May not be correctly displayed across all email clients, browsers and devices
• Might confuse people unless you choose only very familiar emojis
• Might be seen as mass mail and “marketese”

Still, used carefully — and with the blessings of the NNG researchers — why not give them a go? At least A/B test emojis and find out whether they work for you.

ALL CAPS: Use it? Or lose it?

WE THOUGHT IT WAS YELLING, BUT … capitalized subject lines get opened significantly more often than upper and lower case, according to a study by MailChimp.

A couple of caveats:

• Personalizing? Avoid all caps for names. Recipients are especially sensitive to seeing their name in all-caps in a subject line, especially when the rest of the subject line is in sentence case or title case, according to the Nielsen Norman Group. Instead, capitalize the first letter of the recipient’s name only.
• Don’t be afraid to use questions in your subject lines. But skip exclamation points.
• Be careful. MailChimp is an outlier with this advice. Proceed with caution. A/B test.

___

Sources: Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen; Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty, 6th Edition; Nielsen Norman Group, 2017

“Subject Line Data: Choose Your Words Wisely,” Mailchimp, Nov. 13, 2013

The post Should you use emojis in email subject lines? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Nobody wants to miss out: Adding a sense of urgency to your subject lines is one of the best ways to get recipients to read your email.

Or so conclude four organizations that study the science of getting your emails opened, clicked and read.

1. Urgency No. 1.

Urgency headed the list of the most effective subject lines approaches in a study by Return Path, a global data and marketing firm. Return Path analyzed 9 million subject lines sent to 2 million subscribers.

Still time was the best performing phrase in the Return Path study. It got the email read an average of 34% of the time and scored a keyword influence on read rate of 15.54.

But not all “urgent” words and phrases fared so well:

2. Avoid daily urgent emergencies.

Highlighting a sense of urgency can drive people to act, says Phrasee, a London firm that uses artificial intelligence to optimize subject lines.

Phrases like sale starts, back in stock and sale now can increase opens, click throughs and click to open rates.

But pushing deadlines and time limits can also get old fast. Some products seem to be perpetually on a limited-time sale. Readers become numb to those repeated urgent offers.

Bottom line: Find words that create a sense of urgency, but that aren’t boring.

3. I love you, Tomorrow.

Tomorrow increased open rates by 10%, found HubSpot in a survey of 6 million emails. But quick  did not affect opens.

And subject lines including tomorrow outperformed those including a day of the week by 31%, according to Worldata Research.

Choose concrete numbers and times: Pay last year’s fees for next year’s workshops: Book by 12/31.

4. Be creative.

Don’t just pick the words on Return Path’s list. I loved a subject line from Carol Tuttle that said This. Is. It. Final day for DYT jewelry!

5. Urgent sells.

The words urgent, breaking, important and alert increase open rates, according to an analysis by Mail Chimp. The king of mass emailers studied 24 billion emails with subject lines composed of 22,000 distinct words.

Create a sense of urgency.

Bottom line: Words stressing time prod people to open emails.

So:

1. Use words that imply urgency: urgent, breaking, important, alert, tomorrow, now.
2. Add deadlines, cutoff dates and other timely detailsthat move people to act now. These techniques can nudge your readers to open your email message today instead of leaving it languishing in the inbox.
3. Choose concrete numbers and times: Pay last year’s fees for next year’s workshops: Book by 12/31.

Remember, though, your email really needs to be urgent. Don’t oversell. If you say this is the last time, it had better really be the last time.

___

Sources:

“The Art and Science of Effective Subject Lines,” Return Path, Apr. 2015

“Email subject lines that sell,” Phrasee, Apr. 2015

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What makes one email campaign generate an amazing 93% open rate, while another languishes at a dismal 0.5%?

Ask the researchers at MailChimp, an email service provider. They analyzed open rates for more than 200 million emails.

Make emails “short, descriptive and provide the reader with a reason to explore your message further.”

— MailChimp

“The best email subject lines are short, descriptive and provide the reader with a reason to explore your message further,” write the researchers. “Splashy or cheesy phrases more often cause your email to be ignored rather than make them stand out.”

A peek inside MailChimp’s top 5 subject lines all clearly state what’s inside the message.

What do recipients really want?

Subject lines help the folks on your email list decide whether the juice is worth the squeeze — or the e-zine is worth the open. To increase your open rates, write good email subject lines that:

1. Tell, don’t tease.

Don’t make your subject line a teaser to get recipients to open the message. Instead, make your subject lines clear, like these, suggest the folks at the Nielsen Norman Group:

dyad: Dictionary.com Word of the Day

— Word of the Day

Term Loans — Rates as low as 5.5%

— Commerce Bank

NFL Postseason Ticket On-Sale Information

— Kansas City Chiefs

“It might be tempting to think that a generic subject line will entice users to open a message to see its content. After all, if users can see the content in the subject line and determine they’re not interested, they won’t open the message,” writes Janelle Estes, senior user experience specialist at the Nielsen Norman Group.

“It’s much better to inform the user and let them decide than to require them to open a message to find out that they’re not interested in it. Many people may not bother at all and simply delete it instead.”

2. Consider your subject line a promise, and keep it.

If your subject line is Get to know Karelyn Lambert, then your content better not be “shop her favorites” with a link to all of your products. (Maybe make that a call to action or next steps, instead.)

3. Don’t over-deliver.

If you promise targeted content, recipients expect focused, simple content — not sprawling lists of everything including the kitchen sink.

“Users expected the payoff to be high when they clicked to view any email,” write Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group.

“They were satisfied when their expectations were sufficiently met with content that delivered on the promise that the subject line made. However, they were increasingly frustrated when content was only loosely related, or forced them to go to the site to get the information advertised in the subject line with many users stating that they felt mislead by the email.”

And when that happens, your emails are likely to wind up in recipients spam folders.

Avoid generic email newsletter subject lines.

Generic subject lines — “Newsletter name” — are more likely to be deleted than opened. So says usability guru Jakob Nielsen. So says MailChimp.

Why avoid generic subject lines? Repeating subject lines:

1. Reduces email open rates.

“It’s obvious that if you send the same campaign over and over again (such as reminders for an event), your open rates will decline with each subsequent campaign,” write the experts at MailChimp.

How much should you expect it to decline? In one study, MailChimp tracked the results of these similar event reminders:

• 1st email: Funk n Sandi @ The Roxy on 3 March — 8% open rate
• 2nd: Funk ‘n’ Sandi @ The Roxy on 3 March — 6.3%
• 3rd: This Sat 3 Feb — Funk n Sandi @ The Roxy — 5.1%
• 4th: Don’t forget — Funk ‘n’ Sandi this Sat 3 Mar!— 3.5%

2. Makes your message hard to store.

I save my e-zines for reading on planes. I’ll bet you save yours for a more convenient time, too.

The problem with generic subject lines is that they’re hard to store. When I save one with a generic subject line to my “reads” file, I have to rewrite the subject line:

• Instapaper
• Instapaper-2
• Instapaper-3
• Instapaper-4
• Instapaper-5

3. Makes your message hard to find.

Oh, my God! An article in one of your e-zines has changed my life. I want to be able to refer to it often and share it with everyone I know.

But where is it? Will I find it in:

• HubSpot Blog, Opinion
• HubSpot Blog, Opinion-2
• HubSpot Blog, Opinion-3
• HubSpot Blog, Opinion-4
• HubSpot Blog, Opinion-5

How to write specific subject lines

So how can you make your subject lines less generic?

1. Tell the story.

For years, the folks at Daily Puppy sent out this subject line … every … day:

The DailyPuppy | Pictures of Puppies

I like pictures of puppies as much as the next gal, but I’m not sure I’d open that after, say, the 100th day. But Daily Puppy recently changed its subject lines to include the puppy’s name and breed. Who wouldn’t want to:

Meet Pistachio the English Bulldog!

Don’t write e-zine subject lines like this:

April news from Litmus

New Post is up on That’s Not My Age

What’s new in MailChimp: April 2018

Instead, treat your subject lines as headlines. Summarize your lead article in subject lines like these:

5 Types of E-Commerce Shoppers

— Nielsen Norman Group

Police officer’s good deed draws praise on Facebook

— SmartBrief on Social Business

The Interpreter: How America came to love small wars

— The New York Times

Voter registration + turnout = historic midterm election

— Indivisible

Starbucks will close 8,000 locations for racial bias training

— Eater

2. Don’t repeat the sender in the subject line.

They’ve already seen your From line. Avoid wasting any of your 25-40 characters repeating that information.

Instead of …

Alan Weiss | Unique development from Alan Weiss

… how about delivering some details about the development?

Alan Weiss | Multiply your income with new classes

Instead of …

SEO Tips List | [SEO-Tips] Tomorrow’s SEMRush Meetup

… how about delivering some details about the development?

SEO Tips List | Save $50 on tomorrow’s SEMRush Meetup

3. Drop the date.

Most email clients display this information near the subject line. (Not that recipients are scanning your subject line for calendar information.)

Plus: Don’t let dreary details like dates get in the way of the information that actually drives opens: the contents of your e-zine or newsletter.

Overcome sender unfamiliarity.

While generic subject lines don’t get clicked, enticing ones drew them into the email — even when they weren’t familiar with the senders. (And overcoming sender unfamiliarity isn’t easy.)

“When users are looking through their inboxes and dealing with vast amounts of email, any indication that a message is worth opening is helpful,” Nielsen writes.

Like this one, from Roger Dooley:

Simple Hacks to Develop a Magnetic Memory, more

Want to get opened? Before sending an email, make sure your subject line is clear and easy to understand — and change them up.

Learn more

• How to add a sense of urgency to email subject lines
• How to write a recognizable ‘from’ (email address) line
• Don’t be afraid to use questions in subject lines. But skip exclamation points.
• Tips for writing effective social media, blog posts, content marketing pieces
• Learn to get read on mobile devices.

___

Sources: “Best Practices for Email Subject Lines,” MailChimp, June 20, 2018

Janelle Estes, “Email Subject Lines: 5 Tips to Attract Readers,” Nielsen Norman Group, May 4, 2014

Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen; Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty, 6th Edition; Nielsen Norman Group, 2017

The post Tips for writing email subject lines appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Among the most popular subject lines for my e-zine Wylie’s Writing Tips:

Now you see it

The Awwww Factor

Paint the schnauzer

One-sentence stories

Can you read me now?

Don’t commit verbicide

Pleading for shorter sentences

Want to write subject lines that get clicked? Make them entertaining.

Why write clever email subject lines?

Entertainment comprises 2 of the top 3 reasons people share information via email or social media, according to a study by Chadwick Martin Bailey, are:

1. Because I find it interesting/entertaining (72%)
2. To get a laugh (58%)
3. Because I think it will be helpful to recipients (58%)

In another study, three Carnegie Mellon University researchers found that subject lines that make recipients curious about the contents are more likely to get opened than those that don’t.

5 steps to crafting an entertaining subject line

So how do you write subject lines that are entertaining, funny or pique readers’ curiosity? Here are five ways:

1. Make it clever …

Try a little cheekiness, as in this subject line from RLM PR about a media barbecue with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos:

Jeff Bezos Has Great Buns

Or twist a phrase, like the fashion company River Island:

There’s no business like shoe business

Or steal a tip from Weather Underground and post a pun:

Weather to pack sunscreen or an umbrella

Or tie your message to a timely topic, as in this subject line from Ragan:

Mr. Rogers’ guide to healthy corporate culture

Note that while all of these subject lines are clever, they are also clear.

2. … But not too clever.

This Cato Fashions subject line bombed in a study by usability expert Jakob Nielsen:

Be Iconic

So did this clickbait subject line from AT&T:

Steven, wait until you see this!

As did this InterContinental Hotels subject line:

Open Your (I)s to the Wonders of the Sea

Users in the NNG studies complained of “irritatingly cutesy” subject lines. Ouch! Don’t let that phrase apply to your messages!

3. Have a personality.

Make your message personable. In one split test, SmartBrief invited readers to opt in to a newsletter. One subject line:

You’re not receiving your [industry] news

The other:

We’re sorry to see you go …

The second, more personable subject line increased the open rate by 50% and the number of subscribers by more than 60%.

4. Avoid clickbait.

Subject lines with clickbait phrases — won’t believe, shocking and secret of — reduced read rates by .34%, 1.22% and 8.69%, respectively, according to research by Return Path.

5. Avoid labels.

“CEO’s Christmas message” is a label subject line. What does she say in her message? That’s a lot more compelling.
___

Source: “The Art And Science Of Effective Subject Lines” (PDF), Return Path, September 2015

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Useful information is among the top three reasons people share information via email or social media, according to research by Chadwick Martin Bailey:

• Because I find it interesting/entertaining (72%)
• Because I think it will be helpful to recipients (58%)
• To get a laugh (58%)

Those findings echo research by three professors at Carnegie Mellon University. They found that the best way to write subject lines that get opened is to show that your email contains useful information.

In a series of “think-aloud” studies, these professors asked participants to sort through emails in their own inboxes and in inboxes developed for the study.

The answer? Readers are most likely to open emails with subject lines that focus on utility, or relevance — on “information I can use to live my life better.”

So how do you write useful, helpful, relevant subject lines that get opened?

1. Lead with the benefits.

Best subject line ever? This one, from Dawn Grubb, got opened fast:

Margaritas today at 5? I’m buying

Opportunities, offers and discounts drive the most opens, according to Lyris Technologies. So focus on what’s in it for the recipient, not what’s in it for the sender.

This one, a promotional email from Portland Monthly’s Shop Talk, had me at Tim Gunn:

Talk to Tim Gunn | Free Kiehl’s Product | Bad Mall Photos

These two benefits subject lines got opened by subjects in a Nielsen Norman Group test — despite the fact that recipients didn’t know the sender (And overcoming sender unfamiliarity isn’t easy!):

Z100 Pays Your Bills!

Lonely Planet’s top 10 beaches

“When users are looking through their inboxes and dealing with vast amounts of email, any indication that a message with worth opening is helpful,” write Kim Flaherty, et al., in Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty.

This classic advice for every message you write — no surprise! — also works for subject lines: Write about the readers’ needs, not about us and our stuff.

So think benefits.

Benefits words are verbs, not nouns. And the voice of benefits is the imperative.

We learned in school that the imperative voice was the command voice, and it can be:

Go to your room! Do the dishes! Take out the trash!

But used for benefits writing, the imperative voice becomes the invitation voice:

Save money! Make money! Save time!

No wonder benefits verbs like add, open and try increase email reading, according to a study by Return Path, a global data and marketing firm. Return Path looked at more than 2 million email subscribers from 3,000 retail senders over a month last year.

(So, for that matter, do command verbs, like register, download and click.)

Phrasee adds weight to this evidence. Phrasee crunched the numbers on more than 40 billion successful (and not so successful) emails to identify what works and what does not in subject lines.

When it comes to verbs, experiential words like celebrate get top results. Commands like spend perform less effectively. (Because who wants to spend?)

And verbs like continues? Those are lackluster, too, probably because continues is a third-party verb (Wylie Communications continues to be great!)

Readers care more about themselves and their needs that about your company and its stuff. I think continue would have fared better (Continue to become a better writer every day.)

Adestra obtained similar results. Adestra analyzed more than 3 billion emails (free download) to learn which words work — and which don’t — in subject lines.

The U.K.-based email service provider found that verbs like buy and save outperformed adjectives — including free. So consider call-to-action subject lines.

So does this mean that Register! Celebrate! Save! is the best subject line ever?

Not at all.

What it does mean is that leading with a benefits-oriented verb, using the imperative voice and focusing on what the reader will get out of your email is a best practice for subject lines. Just like it is for every other thing you write.

2. Write how-to subject lines.

How-to information is the No. 2 type of content that gets retweeted, according to research by Dan Zarrella (PDF), viral marketing scientist for HubSpot. Tipsheets and service stories — aka “how to” stories — are also more likely to be read, used and acted upon.

No wonder Zarrella’s list of the 17 words that get clicked most often include tips and latest.

So find readers’ pain points and offer ways to address them. Words and phrases like how to and secrets suggest the kinds of value-added service stories that readers seek.

And, though Return Path didn’t test it, How to has always been a winner for service stories. Why not test that phrase for your subject lines, as well?

3. Use the magic word.

It’s the most retweeted word in the English language, according to viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella: You.

You is the most retweeted word in the English language.

— Dan Zarrella, viral marketing scientist

And no wonder. Starting your message with “you” pushes the benefits to the front of the sentence and focuses your message on the reader’s favorite subject.

In fact, we’ve known since 1934 that people love to read about themselves. That’s the year Ralph Tyler and Edgar Dale conducted a study that proved that second-person pronouns — you — increase reading, while first-person pronouns (I, me, we, us) reduce readability.

Now we’re learning this lesson again, this time from Return Path’s study. People are less likely to open and click through emails with first-person pronouns (I, me, our, mine) in the subject lines, according to Return Path. Researchers found that you was the only pronoun that increased email readership.

It’s about the reader! Folks, that’s 85 years of research telling us to write about the reader and the reader’s needs — in subject lines as well as everything else we write. And still, day after day, year after year, we show up at work, open our laptops, and write — once again — about us and our stuff.

So if you want to reach your reader, write about the reader. Don’t write about your organization and its products, services, programs and ideas — aka “us and our stuff.”

In subject lines, as in so much else in life, better you than we.

4. Ask a question.

When auctioneer Dick Soulis let his list know about an opportunity to help producers of a new TV series, his subject line said:

Do You Have A Piece of History?

National Geographic Channel Wants You

And Angie’s List sent asked this question in a subject line:

How long will your paint job last?

Why questions in subject lines?

When the facts are on your side, asking a question is more effective than making a statement, according to research by Daniel J. Howard and Robert E. Burnkrant at Ohio State University.

That’s because people receive statements passively. But with questions, they actively come up with their own reasons for agreeing.

And researchers at the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo found that people are more likely to click on question headlines with the word “you” than on declarative statement headlines.

Their advice: Ask intriguing questions that make people think, rather than questions with a simple yes or no answer.

What question could you ask to draw readers into your message?

5. Add a number.

Email Labs ran a split test of these three subject lines. Which do you think was most effective?

• Using Link Click-Through Tracking to Segment Your List
• 3 Tips to Improve Your Newsletter’s ROI
• Build Your List Through “Piggy-Back Marketing”

If you guessed the second, you’re right. “3 Tips” produced both higher open and click-through rates than the other two.

Why? Numerals in display copy sell because they promise quantifiable value. So think 3 Tips, 6 Ways, 7 Steps.

Oddly, odd numbers sell better than even ones. So 7 Steps is better than 10 Tips.

6. Add a sense of urgency.

Subject lines that conveyed a sense of urgency were the top performers in Return Path’s study.

So consider reminding recipients that there’s “still time” to take advantage of an offer.

7. Avoid exclamation points.

The average open rate for subject lines without exclamation points was 18% in one study; those without averages a 17% open rate.

The more exclamation points, the lower the open rate. Subject lines with two exclamation points netted 16.7% opens. Add a third, though, and the rate went down to 16.5%.

Make your subject line work.

Some 35% of email recipients use the subject line to decide whether to open a message, according to a study by DoubleClick.

Which means that this teeny-tiny piece of copy does the heavy lifting when it comes to getting your email opened and read.

To get higher open rates, make the most of your 25 to 40 characters: Show your email list that your email is relevant, valuable and useful to your readers.

Learn more digital marketing tips.

• How to write good email subject lines: These subject line strategies can result in more opened emails.
• How to organize content marketing pieces: Make this your email template.
• How to write a case study: Show what you can do by illustrating what you have done.
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Eight out of 10 businesspeople and more than half of consumers use preview panes to decide whether to open an email, according to Lyris Technologies.

That makes the preview pane is one of the elements desktop and laptop readers consider when deciding whether to open or delete your email message.

Feel the pane

But the preview pane can be a pain to email communicators. According to a survey by EmailLabs:

• More than half of email recipients don’t see images in the preview pane because their companies or email programs block them. Counting on an image to get their attention? Chances are, you won’t get through.
• Three-quarters of email recipients who use a preview pane use it in a horizontal format. That means they can only see four inches or so of your message. However, one-quarter use a vertical pane, so you can’t count on that four-inch horizontal bar of real estate being seen by all your recipients.
• Nearly half look at just the first few lines to decide whether they want to read your message.

Overcome the pane barrier

How do you make the preview pane work for you?

• Sell your content in the top left corner. That two- to four-inch space is where horizontal and vertical panes intersect — and it’s all you can count on previewers viewing.
• Think horizontal. Your second most valuable real estate is the top two to four inches of your message.
• Tweet your key message. Most email systems preview the first 50-75 characters of a message. So write your opening sentence as a tweet — or more like half a tweet, suggests Steve Rubel.
• Focus on text, not graphics. Most people don’t see graphics in the preview pane, so make flags, logos and other images smaller and move them out of the upper-left corner.
• Move administrative information to an administrative center at the bottom of the message.

A world of pane

In this environment, it’s important to pay special attention to your “from” lines and subject lines. Three out of five email recipients say they consult those to decide whether they’ll even scan the information in the preview pane — or just delete it without looking.

Does your preview pane snag eyes? Take EmailLabs’ Email Preview Pane Rendering Quiz to find out.

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Sources:

“Strategies for Addressing the Challenges of Preview Panes and Disabled Images,” EmailLabs

Loren McDonald, “Designing Emails For the Preview Pane and Disabled Images,” EmailLabs, Oct. 28, 2005

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