How To Write A Good Email Subject Line: Get Your Reader’s Attention And Avoid The Spam Folder

You do know that every survey, study and report ever published shows that email marketing has one of the single highest ROIs, right?

In a “go social” world email may seem passé, even “dead” but trust me – heck, don’t trust me, trust any one of these reports  – email is still alive, kicking and bringing in some pretty decent revenue for a whole lot of businesses.

Statistics And Other Tidbits To Convince You To Use Email As A Marketing Tool

As of 2011 (I know, eons ago in internet years) the Direct Marketing Association reported that for every dollar spent, here’s what you could expect to get in return on each of these:

Catalogs: $7.30

Search: $22.24

Internet advertising: $19.72

Mobile: $10.51

Email: $40.56

If that’s not enough of a “why” to get your email on, consider the fact that it’s also one of the most inexpensive marketing platforms and one of the easiest to do. If you’re willing to live with their logo at the bottom of your emails, you can use a management tool like MailChimp for free. If not, it’s a minimal investment for a monthly plan.

As for easy, well, no marketing is truly “easy” and it all requires goal setting, planning, execution and analysis. But in the grand scheme of things it’s pretty simple to set up a decent email template and send it to your list.

So we’ve got a free/inexpensive platform, an easy task and a pretty good track record on ROI. What could possibly go wrong?

Subject Lines Can Kill Your Email Campaigns Dead

Wouldn’t it be terrible if the only thing standing between you and your customer is a poor choice of a few words?

Poor subject lines can be ignored, or worse, end up in spam folders where they may never be seen. I don’t know about you but I check my spam folder about, oh, once in… never. Unless someone specifically tells me they’ve sent an email I haven’t received, I ignore the heck out of that folder.

Once, spam was a huge pain in the butt, until filters got a whole lot more aggressive. Now to be honest, I get almost zero spam delivered to my inbox. The downside is that spam filters have gotten a whole lot more aggressive, and that means even legitimate email, especially bulk and commercial emails, can end up in spam.

What if I told you that one of the simplest “quick fixes” to keep your email from being either ignored or filtered is to change your subject line? Bet you’d want to know how to do it!

How To Write An Email Subject Line That Evades The Delete Key And The Spam Filter, Too

Set Expectations

A subject line doesn’t have to be a work of art. Sometimes, simpler is better. If you send out monthly newsletters, there is nothing wrong with putting “Monthly Newsletter From [Your Company]” in the subject line. This lets readers know exactly what to expect.

Don’t worry that it’s boring. If you’ve built your list based on people who want your content, then they’ll want your content even without the clever headline. Sometimes people just want your newsletter.

Don’t Make It A Headline

Some advice you’ll find around the internet will tell you to mimic magazine or newspaper headlines to catch your customer’s attention. I disagree. Magazines and newspapers are not email. Magazines and newspapers do not spam us and show up unexpectedly in our email boxes to irritate us. You can say sensational things in headlines and get away with it (Lindsay Lohan tells you how she conquered Darth Vader with just a Prada purse?? Got to read that one!)

Sensational headlines get us to pick the publication up and check it out but more than likely we already know it’s sensationalized. A sensational email subject line just makes us feel cheated. This all goes back to expectations. We expect certain types of headlines in our print publications but find them spammy in email. Unless you can deliver on your “headline”, don’t use it.

Keep It Short

Most email clients cut off your subject line after a few words so if you don’t get your point across up front, it may not give someone enough of a reason to bother opening it. Try to keep it to a few words or at least put your key words at the beginning of the sentence so you can catch someone’s interest.

Describe The Content (Bonus If You Can Tell Someone Why It Matters)

Again, a subject line does not have to be an award-winning contest in creativity. It just has to work, and sometimes simple is best. If your email is a 10% coupon, tell people it’s a 10% coupon. If it’s a list of holiday recipes, tell people it’s a list of holiday recipes. I bet you get the point.

This is partly about expectations and partly about being able to put the benefit up front. If you’re sending emails, chances are you’re doing it for a reason. You’re not just throwing a bunch of junk into a template and calling it marketing. So describe the why and the what’s in it for me? Back to the recipe example; tell people it’s a list of holiday recipes that will make cooking a snap/are inexpensive/easy to clean up after/kid-friendly. Pick a benefit and use it to describe what your readers will get out of your email.

Make It Timely

We are a society very much “in the now”. If you’re sending out a webinar announcement, coupon, special offer, etc., you want to give people a relatively small window to respond. Do you know what I do with emails that give me a week to use a coupon? I save it, then I forget about it, then I miss the coupon and I don’t buy anything. But when I get an email that says “today only” or “ends tomorrow” I’m a lot more likely to act.

This is not a trick, it’s just human nature. We respond when we have to. If you want people to take advantage of a special offer then make it immediate and convey that in your subject line. It’s a bit Pavlovian. When someone tells us to “do this now”, many times we just do!

Make It Actionable

If there’s one thing even the most know-it-all among us want, it’s to know more. If you offer something that promises to be informative, people are more likely to respond. Take the recipe example again. A compelling subject line might read something like “10 ways to simplify work night meals.” Who doesn’t want to know that??

You can use this creatively whatever your industry. If you’re a retailer selling purple widgets, you might have a subject line that promises “5 ideas for using purple widgets to spruce up your décor.” This goes back to benefits, but it requires you to plan and market the benefit first.

And remember, you must deliver! Don’t promise 5 ideas and then give someone a 10% coupon .

Don’t Be My Friend

Nothing says “Ignore me, I’m spam” as much as a subject line that reads, “Hi! How are you today, Carol Lynn?” Once I hit delete, I’m usually just fine. This personal approach may sound like a good idea but it’s not professional and it’s a ploy used by so many spammers to get our attention that most people are immune to it by now.

Don’t Ask For Help Or Money

This is the exception to the “describe your content” rule. You may very well be asking for help or donations for a fantastic cause but you don’t want to say it in your subject line. For starters, people are busy. The last thing they want to do is go through the effort of opening and reading an email just to find out it requires more effort to help you. And I don’t know about you but ever since I donated five bucks to some charity twenty years ago I’ve been getting hit with solicitations from every charity imaginable to help, donate and support. Even the ones I do support unfortunately end up deleted if they show up in my inbox.

The word “help” has traditionally shown one of the lowest open rates when it’s used in a subject line, so don’t ask for it. Instead, get people interested in your content and add your help or donate link inside. You may do that by announcing a success story, making it a newsletter or even making it a soft sell – “3 ways to take action and wipe out cancer.” In the end you may just want someone’s money, but if you give them options and don’t specifically ask for money, your open rate will go up.

Avoid Caps, Exclamation Points And Other Symbols

So far we’ve talked mostly about how to avoid the delete key, but this one will also help you avoid the spam filter. Spammers to this day employ certain tricks to get us to open their emails. Fortunately, our filters keep those out of our way, but if you inadvertently do what they do, as legitimate as your email may be, it’s going to end up in the same place.

Your email may be pretty exciting but convey it in words, not exclamation points and absolutely not more than one!! All caps are also a no-no. Some senders that get away with this are news organizations that start a subject with “BREAKING NEWS” or “ALERT” but on the whole you should avoid this.

As for symbols, there’s nothing like a good old $ to get you filtered. You can usually slip one in somewhere if you really need to ($10 off today only) but be very careful when doing this and if you do…

Test

If you don’t already have them, go ahead and set up a free email account using every service you can – Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo. Then before you send out your email campaign, send a test to each and every one of those accounts. See whether you received the email or if it got bumped to spam. If you’ve got a corporate account and use Outlook or are behind a company firewall, even better. You can see exactly which domains accept and reject your emails.

Watch Your Words

By now you probably know that anything with the word “Viagra” in the subject line, not to mention a few unmentionables, will end up in spam every time. But some seemingly innocuous words can trigger spam filters and you can thank the spammers for that. Words like urgent, increase, win and even free can get you filtered.

There are three things you can do to mitigate this:

1. See above. Test. If you’re actually offering something free and want it in your subject line, go ahead and use it, but test first.
2. Be honest. The less you try to trick or cajole people into opening your email, the better off you’ll be. Don’t sensationalize, hype or get too sales-y.
3. See below…

Check Your Spam Folder

As of right now, there are 369 messages in my spam folder and that’s only because I emptied it a few days ago. But it’s a treasure trove of information. If you check your spam folder I guarantee you’ll get a whole lesson in “what not to do”. If you see subject lines with words like “performance” there repeatedly (oh, you will) then it’s probably a word you should avoid.

The Best Tip I Can Give You: For the Win

This one really needs its own category because it’s something you can and should do every day. You don’t need to be sending out emails or even thinking about sending out emails to do it.

Study.

That’s right, study. Start by subscribing to email updates and newsletters from everyone imaginable. If you’re neurotic about this, create a separate email account where you can have these emails delivered and sequestered. Then when you receive them, pay attention to the subject lines.

Which ones are interesting? Which ones sound like a load of hype? Which ones actually compel you to open the emails? Which ones sound unprofessional, stupid, clever, brilliant? (Which ones totally end up in your spam folder?)

True story: I once had a client who spent so much time agonizing over, tweaking and debating subject lines that many times the emails went out days late or not at all. At that rate, even a bad subject line is better than none at all.

This doesn’t have to be you. You don’t need to reinvent the subject line wheel every time you send one out. You just need to do what works and what many others before you have spent time studying and agonizing over so you don’t have to.

Create yourself a nice little spreadsheet of wins and losses and start building your own arsenal of ideas. All the better if next time you send out an email you pilfer someone else’s awesome subject line, tack on your company name or benefit and call it a day.

Now run off and start testing, studying and creating awesome subject lines. But first… got any other tips to share, or strategies that have worked for you?