Subject Line Tips
Tips to Help You Get Opened
Less than a second. That’s how long it takes a person to decide the fate of your email. When your professional job is marketing and success hinges on you getting emails opened, read, and acted on, (see what we did there?) then you need to make sure they are effective. Here's our top 10 tips to make an impact.
Keep It Active The challenge with subject lines is you have limited space. Using action words like “get,” “watch,” “join,” or similar can help use that space more wisely. Why? Action words make your subject line more powerful.
For example, if you have an upcoming webinar, you might write:
Join to Learn How to 10x Email Open Rates
In this example, you’re telling the reader exactly what they need to do and combining it with a specific promise.
You might write a juicy subject line but you’ll face performance issues if it’s too long. Email providers have specific limits to how much text they’ll display, which can threaten to chop off part of your message. Here’s an example:
Long subject line:
Join to Learn How {Company Name} Doubled Revenue and 10x Email Open Rates
What your reader actually sees:
Join to Learn How {Company Name} Double…
A big difference, right? You lost the best parts of your message.
So, how long is too long? A good subject line is typically 50 characters or less.
Spammy words earn you a one-way ticket to the junk folder. And here’s the worst part. Machine learning is watching you, so if your emails habitually get marked as spam, getting back into the inbox will be hard. A few potential trigger words to avoid:
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PLUS, watch your use of symbols, emojis, and all caps. They can quickly make you look spam-like to both readers and the ISPs.
