- Fri 04/08/2016 13:34

As an email marketing provider, we spend a lot of time analyzing and thinking about this topic. If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you know we share a lot of useful information about how businesses of all sizes can get the most out of their email marketing efforts. While we encourage you to read through that information and implement it into your own business, there’s one big hurdle every business has to get over.

That hurdle is ensuring people actually receive and open the emails you’re sending. Regardless of how compelling of an email you create, it’s not going to move the needle for your business if it doesn’t end up in people’s inboxes or is ignored by everyone who receives it. Facing this challenge is a two-part process. On the topic of ensuring your emails make it to their intended destination, working with Global IntelliSystems means you’ll be on a platform that has been in the business of maximizing email deliverability for over a decade.

The other step in this process is getting recipients to open your email once it arrives in their inbox. Since your email will show up as a single line among many others, you need to make every character count. Smart email marketing starts with sending from an email address and associated name people will remember. Then what can really make or break email marketing success is the subject line you write.

A great subject line can maximize email opens and subsequent engagement, while the wrong subject line can cause your emails to be ignored. Additionally, a subject line people perceive as misleading will result in a significant percentage of recipients unsubscribing from your email list. Because there’s so much riding on your email subject lines, here’s what you need to do to write great ones:

The Secret to Unlocking Email Marketing Success Through Subject Lines

Research shows that the best words you use in your subject lines will vary depending on your audience. For example, a B2C business like a fashion brand would write different subject lines than a B2B business that fabricates industrial parts. So the more you know about your audience and the types of words they use, the better you can reflect those in your subject lines.

While that doesn’t fully answer the question of how to craft subject lines, the good news is there are four best practices that do. To write great subject lines,

  • motivate with a sense of immediacy
  • communicate that you’re providing easily digestible content
  • avoid marketing speak
  • share specifics instead of using generic terms (15% off vs. save today)

By referring to those practices whenever you write an email subject line, you should find that you’re able to consistently maximize your open rate!