Everyday you receive a lot of emails that we don’t care about or even that are spam. That is the reason why you usually don’t read every email you get, and the reason why you delete most of them without even open them or you mark them as spam. The only information you have to decide it, are the sender and the subject line, which shows us the importance of these two elements in the success of an email marketing campaign.
Your subscribers will look at the “Form” field when they receive the campaign or newsletter to be sure they recognize the sender name or email address, and only if they recognize it they open the email. That is why I recommend you to use the name of the company as the sender of the campaign, or a very well known person in the company, whose name will be recognizable by all of your subscribers.
I think that a good strategy to write the subject line of your campaign or newsletter is keeping one part consistent in every email and a variable part that changes every campaign. This way your subscribers will recognize your newsletter, and at the same time get a little taste of what they will find in the content.
Here you have some examples of bad subject lines:
- This is the permission based Email Marketing Monthly Newsletter for May, 1 2009 by Pixelnews
This subject line is very long. My recommendation is to keep the subject line between 20 and 50 characters. This one above has 80 characters and most of the email clients will cut it off and the chances of getting blocked as spam by the filters are higher.
- (COMPANY NAME)’S NEWSLETTER FOR MAY 2009
In this case the subject is in all caps, which increases the chances of getting blocked as spam by the filters.
- Cooking tips
This subject gives too little information about the content
- Special offer – save 80$ buying now!!!
This subject line contains both exclamation points and a dollar sign ($), which also increases the chances of been blocked as Spam. If the message gets through, it is also very probable that the subscriber consider it as Spam anyways.
Here you have a revised version of the subject lines analyzed before:
- Permission based Email Marketing Newsletter for May
- (Company Name)’s Newsletter for May 2009
- Monthly cooking tips – How to bake the best Brownie
- Special offer – 20% off today
Tags: email marketing, Newsletter, Subject Lines
Its funny that i found your discussion on LinkedIn because i am just in the process of revamping my companies newsletter and at the top of the list”Subject Line”
thanks for the tip
It is the destiny Rachel!! Hehehehe. I hope you find it useful. Are you already using any app to send out your newsletter? Maybe you want to give Pixelnews.es a try.
Great info José. Here’s a nifty little trick for defining attention grabbing subject lines: http://indiemarkllc.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/how-to-email-subject-lines/