Email Marketing – Don’t underestimate the power of the subject line

The success of your email marketing campaign can be won or lost on what is contained in the subject line. Those few short words have a big influence on whether or not a customer opens the email and interacts with the content or deletes it unread. So, before rewriting War and Peace in your newsletters content, concentrate on getting a succinct, powerful and effective message into 50 characters or less. Forget Twitter and its rather liberal 140 characters, the difference between an effective or a dud email newsletter campaign is how you craft 50 characters in the subject line.

It is now commonly accepted that email newsletters are an effective form of customer communication. Anything, therefore, that can be done to encourage open rates and interaction with the content and offers it contains works to improve the overall effectiveness of the communication. The most opened HTML email newsletters are ones with simple messages that mentioning the brand or company in the line and give a clear descriptor as to what the email is about. For example – John Smiths Bitter March Newsletter or British Airways Volcanic Ash Disruption Update.

Consciously or not readers form their expectations of what is in the email newsletter and whether they will be interested or not from the subject line. It is therefore worth testing subject lines and their effectiveness by creating two or three test groups from your newsletter sign ups. By altering the wording test group by test group you can begin to understand which wording is most effective. Putting the work in ahead of the big send out will give you a better open rate and allow you to hone your understanding of what customer communications work best in your field.

Customers have likely signed up for an email newsletter to be kept informed about what your company is doing – new products, offers, expansions etc. That does not mean they necessarily want to be sold to via the newsletters. Research shows that it is best to avoid certain words and symbols as they come across as sales-like and can therefore be deemed junk mail. These words include, but are no means limited to free, help, reminder, special and sale and if you can avoid using %, ! or ? then your open rates should see a rise too.

Email marketing is an opportunity to build a relationship with your client or customer. It is also an opportunity to add value to their understanding of your niche or give them information and market intelligence they can use in their everyday work. This being so, customers will come to value the consistency you commit to producing these newsletters with. If it is a weekly newsletter, make sure you send it weekly. If it is monthly, make sure you send it monthly. The consistency of sending will also become related to the consistency of the subject line. If you find a type of subject line that works for your audience then don’t be afraid to use it. It begins to build brand recognition and should have an impact on your open rates.

Whether you are starting a new newsletter or are looking to increase the open rate of a well established one, starting with a good subject line can make all the difference to your customer communication.