Today in class, a guest speaker came to talk about how to write a better subject line for e-mail promotions. He demonstrated the use of Mailchimp, an email marketing service provider that tests and evaluates how good your e-mail subject line and its expected open rate. Personally, I never really paid attention to which e-mails I click and don’t click – I guess I tend to open the ones from the brands I really like (mostly cosmetics and fashion) or last-minute travel deals. To experiment, I opened my gmail account to see which promotional e-mails appeal to me the most.
Out of 500+ promotional emails I left unopened, only three emails on the list survived and did not get sent to trash.
The first email was from Coach, a fashion retailer and its subject line was: Enjoy $100 off $300 Now: Don’t Miss Out!
The second one was from Booking.com: Last-minute deals for Rome and Milan. Get them before they’re gone!
Well the last one was from BCom Career Centre… I don’t know why it was classified as a promotion. I will ignore this one!
Whether I open specific emails or not totally depend on my personal preferences and what I am seeking at the moment (a travel package for winter vacation or a gift idea for Christmas), however they certainly stood out among the emails from their competitors. Both emails have one thing common: they all emphasize on urgency using words like “last-minute” and “don’t miss out.”
I came across a useful article “How to Write the Perfect Email Subject Line [Infographic]” by Oli Gardner, which discusses tactics and tips on how to write a good email subject line which can lead to the increased open rate.
According to Gardner, there is a simple golden rule to start off, which everyone should be aware off.
Do
Set your subscribers’ expectations and clearly state what’s inside the email
Don’t
Write your subject lines like advertisements. The folks at MailChimp say it perfectly: “When it comes to email marketing, the best subject lines tell what’s inside, and the worst subject lines sell what’s inside
There are 6 steps to improve email open rates.
- Step 1: Be useful and ultra specific – make sure it’s relevant and useful for your customers
- Step 2: Identify yourself – mention your most identifiable brand product in the subject line, or prefix the subject line with a consistent identifier
- Step 3: Be visually different – make you subject stand out visually by trying square brackets, sparing use of capitalization, phone numbers or quotes
- Step 4: Use timely topics and urgency that are top of mind, and use urgency occasionally to point out deadlines
- Step 5: Use a call-to-action (CTA) by asking a question
- Step 6: Test your subject lines so you can repeat what works best
I personally receive over 50 emails a day. Emails range from clubs I am involved with to class project group members , from an online shopping mall I randomly signed up for to a retailer I recently made a purchase from. I tend to just delete all the ones I have no interest in in order to clean up my account – the number of random promotional emails is just overwhelming. Writing the perfect email subject line and making sure your email doesn’t get dumped into Trash right away is perhaps the hardest part in email marketing. Keeping the above rules in mind and utilizing a website like Mailchimp will surely help!