About your Subject Line

While your reputation, recognition factor and what you've sent before will play key roles in whether you get opened, the subject line is at the top of the list for influencing an open this time. In fact, a recent ReturnPath study found 58% of subscribers will decide what to do based on the subject line. Another rather sobering figure from the Email Sender and Provider Coalition says that 70% decide to click on the "report spam" button based on the subject line. Yikes! That puts added pressure on you to be a welcome, recognised email in the inbox AND announce your good intentions as soon as possible.

Taking all this into consideration, here are some ideas for creating subject lines that work in your favour with your recipients.
 
Have a good "from" sender line -  People generally scan down the sender column of their inbox and then read across to the subject line to decide whether to open, save-for-later or delete. Your email should be "from" the most immediately recognisable entity to your subscribers; this may be a person at the company who has the relationship with your subscriber, your company itself or a brand associated with your company.  

Take a look at your own inbox - Take time out to assess how you react to subject lines in your own inbox, and apply these learnings to your own marketing. Also, sign up for competitors' emails to analyse how they're using, or not using, subject lines - and incorporate this knowledge into your creation process.

Be clear and incentivise - Think about what your goals are for this mailing. Sure it's to get opened by the subscriber - but then what? For example; is it to click on links for further reading, is it to make an immediately time-sensitive purchase, or is it to attend an event? Craft a subject line that gets the WIFM factor across (What's In It For ME) right away by listing what's the value to the recipient to be had in the email.

Be frugal with the space you have to work with -  You've got up to 35-40 characters that will by default show in most platforms; and less in handhelds. An interesting study, just released by AlchemyWorx, found that subject lines of less then 60 characters proved best for optimising open rates, while click and click-to-open rates were optimised by subject lines over 70 characters. Still, even if you decide to craft a longer subject line, including the up to 60 characters mentioned in this study - it will be those first 20-35 characters - or 4-5 words - that really need to entice, or immediately begin to tell the story, in order to help drive the traffic into the body of your email. The bottom line, and most important thing to do here, is to TEST for your own list to find out what performs best with your subscribers and to get the results you want.

Watch out for filter words - While there are obvious things such as all caps, a series of dollar signs or exclamation marks, in general, spam trigger words or phrases are not just the obvious ones we think of. In today's delivery environment, spam filters (including Outlook 2007) use scoring systems which match each word and phrase against an extensive list of trigger phrases. This is why testing is so essential to your mailing process to spot any problems before you do your main send. (Find in depth information about deliverability and spam filters at the Email Marketing Reports website.)

Always test - Take advantage of this fantastic benefit of email. You can test quickly with a small batch taken from your main database. Test versions of the subject line before you send to your whole list. For example, test whether a percent off or actual money off gets better results. 

Segment and target by subject line - The subject line is really just another content module in your email. With today's technology it is easy to segment your lists - and you should think about applying segmentation to the subject line. It could be as simple as segmenting out by customer and prospect; same email newsletter, but a different subject line for each group, highlighting specific relevant content that's in the newsletter.

Measure results beyond opens - Don't measure the success of a subject line by just the identified open rate. Also track metrics such as clicks and conversions to get a big picture of what's performing best for you. Perhaps with a subject line you are seeing a higher open rate, but getting less clicks and even less conversions. (Read more about metrics here and specifically about click-through metrics here.)