How to write a captivating subject line
Ever wondered why your campaign goes unnoticed in your contact's inbox even though it has all the ingredients including an elegant email template, personalized content, and catchy images? It might be due to the absence of a powerful subject line. Whenever people receive an email, they immediately assess the subject line. They decide to open the email only when they are intrigued by it. Marketers need to understand that the subject line is the gateway to hitting their conversion goals.
Keep it crisp
We strongly urge you to write subject lines that have a maximum of six words. This is because recipients mostly check their emails on the go and won't prefer reading lengthy subject lines. They will expect the subject line to be crisp and convey the crux of the email.
Capitalize key words and use emoji
While crafting a subject line, you can capitalize important words to grab the recipient's attention. You can also use emojis in your subject line, however, we urge you not to overuse them. Sometimes emojis may not get displayed on certain email clients—instead, a blank check box will be displayed. When using emojis, it's advisable to test your campaign on different email clients to identify such issues.
Add a pre-header
The pre-header is the short text that follows the subject line that can be viewed only in the list view of your inbox. It's designed to support the subject line in conveying the essence of an email. A good pre-header should convince the recipient to open the email. While crafting the pre-header, ensure the following:
- You don't repeat the subject line
- You keep it short and crisp
- You don't overuse emojis
Offer relevant content
While crafting the subject line, in addition to ensuring that it's concise and clear, make sure it's also relevant to the email message. The subject line should never be misleading—it should accurately represent the content you're going to present in the email. If you make false promises in the subject line and the email message doesn't offer what was promised, recipients may unsubscribe or mark the email as spam.
Personalize the subject line
It's a given that people prefer receiving personalized content over generic emails. Personalizing the subject line greatly improves the open rate of an email. In Zoho Marketing Automation, you can use merge tags to personalize the subject line. Personalizing the subject line will not only boost the email open rate, but it will also help you create a positive impression. In the long run, this will help you strengthen your customer base.
Use A/B testing
To understand what your contacts expect from you, you can use the A/B testing feature. With this, you can craft two campaigns with different subject lines and send them to two different sets of your contacts. You can use the subject line that received the better response and send that campaign to the remaining contacts. This will help you understand the pulse of your contacts and cater to them accordingly.
Mobile-optimize your campaign
These days, people prefer checking their mailbox on their mobile phones. So we urge you to mobile-optimize your campaign so that the content, images, and subject line load perfectly on mobile devices. You can mobile-optimize your campaign and test it on various devices to identify any alignment issues.
Do a spell check
The subject line and the pre-header are two aspects that will be noticed by recipients even before opening an email. Having grammatical errors or typos in the subject line and pre-header won't make the best impression for your campaign. Sometimes if there are errors, recipients may even choose not to open the email. So it's advisable to check for grammatical errors and typos in the subject line and the pre-header before sending the campaign.
What to avoid
While crafting your subject line, you need to avoid committing these mistakes:
Using special characters
It is advisable to avoid using special characters like $, #, @, & in your subject line. If you use them, there are chances for spam filters deployed by mailbox providers to classify your emails as spam.
Using spam trigger words
We strongly urge you not to use spam trigger words like "order now", "cash bonus", "cheap", etc. Spam filters will look for these words and will flag emails containing them.
Using one-word subject lines
One-word subject lines will look unprofessional and spammy. When recipients read such subject lines, many may not open the email. Keeping the subject line short is ideal. However, reducing it to one word will not guarantee a high open rate.
Using all caps
Capitalizing the important words in a subject line is a great idea. However, capitalizing all the words will give a negative impression to the recipients. Also, spammers generally capitalize all the words in the subject line when sending emails. If you capitalize all the words in your subject line, spam filters of mailbox providers may consider it suspicious.
Using a lot of punctuation marks
Most spammers use a lot of punctuation marks in their subject line. If you overuse punctuation marks, your emails may get flagged by spam filters deployed by mailbox providers.
Faking Re/Fwd tags
When email recipients find the Re/Fwd tag in an email, they may assume it to be from a known source. Spammers mostly use the Re/Fwd tag in their emails so that the chances of the recipients opening them are higher. Spam filters and anti-spam services carefully analyze emails with the Re/Fwd tag. If they find emails with fake tags, they will flag those emails. So we recommend only using the Re/Fwd tags when genuinely appropriate. You can click here to learn more about multi-thread emails.
Using false promises and aggressive statements
Subject lines seeking help, emergency, sensitive information, and other favors are considered suspicious by recipients and spam filters. We recommend our users to use subject lines that intrigue the recipients without demanding they open the emails.
After all the effort you put in to crafting your campaign, you won't want the subject line to cost you the conversion your campaign truly deserves. We urge you to foolproof your subject line and pre-header before sending a campaign, as they contribute to the success of your campaign in a big way.
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