Email Marketing: Subject Line Tips

Christine Foulds • July 1, 2023

This post was first published in 2018

In recent months, I have noticed that businesses are trying to pack in as much as possible in one newsletter. This leads to an endless seeming mailer which is packed with different marketing messages, long subject lines and various small images. Therefore a simple marketing campaign becomes all of a sudden very complex and most of all confusing to the reader.

I am a great believer in the motto KISS: Keep It Short and Simple. After all, your subscribers will receive not only your mailer but eight, nine or even ten other messages from various companies within the same day. For a marketing message to be able to stand out, it needs to be precise, straight to the point and short. These are also the attributes that a subject line should have.

So what should you consider when you think of a sharp and convincing subject line. Here are 3 quick easy fixes to improve your subject lines.

1. Don't sell
First of all remember, a subject line is not there to sell your product but to inform the subscriber on what the mailer is about and to convince them to open the mailer based on the content provided. Therefore stay away from certain phrases and words. Free or Sale are words that will most likely get your mailer in the spam folder and if not that, will generate a very low open rate. Using words written in capital letters only will also not work in your favour and same goes for an over usage of exclamation marks.

2. Keep it short
Subject lines that are too long will be cut off by most of the inboxes such as gmail, hotmail and yahoo. On top of that, if the message is not straight to the point subscribers will most likely not open the mailer as the basic information has not been communicated well. To avoid this, try to keep the subject line to a maximum of 50 characters.

3. Create a new subject line for every mailer
Coming up with a new subject line is time consuming and involves a lot of testing. For me it's not a surprise that some businesses decide to hardly ever change the content used. However, by doing that they also face an ever decreasing open rate because subscribers are not encouraged to continue reading the messages prepared for them. It's essential to always come up with a new subject line. Vary the wording, use a question every once in a while to keep subscribers engaged, check what your competitors are sending out and try not to repeat their subject line. For example there is a tendency to use the following phrase: 'Beat the January Blues'. If several businesses are already using it, try to stay away from it.

There are of course more steps that can be taken to improve subject line performances such as using more proactive verbs and not always start with a noun but if the discussed three points are put into practise, your mailer performance will start improving.

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To say that the last few weeks have been extremely busy would be an understatement. There has been a lot of change over the last few weeks and we’re still in the midst of it. So, what’s been going on? Some brands were let go. Seven of the bingo brands that I was looking after have been sold to a new owner. This meant a lot of handovers, finishing of campaigns and preparing as well as executing the exit strategy well. It was with mixed feelings seeing these brands go as I’ve been working with them for over eight years. However, feelings aside, it was a very good business decision. Some brands were migrated. On top of handing over existing brands, I also managed to migrate one of our current casino brands to a casino environment that we’re already using with the remaining casino brands. This was actually a very smooth process as most of it was handled by our partner Progress Play. Nevertheless, the CRM journeys had to be updated and we also took this as an opportunity to give the marketing material a bit of a refresh. Two of our bingo brands are being launched at a completely new platform with a company in Manchester called Grace Media. This has been very time consuming as we’re starting completely from scratch. I’m getting to know new systems like XtremPush which I’ve not used in the past. Setting up new CRM journeys, promotions, terms and conditions as well as updating the look and feel of the brands has kept me very, very busy. New brand was taken on. As part of the new partnership with Grace Media , we took on a new bingo brand called BOGOF along side our two brands that we’ve migrated to Grace Media. I had the pleasure of going to Manchester and working with the team for a week. What else? On top of that, I started work with a new Klaviyo customer called Blue Line Abrasives . It’s an industry that I know where little about so it’s great to have their team at hand to assist when I have product related questions. What’s next? Over the next few weeks, things should slow down and settle a bit. Fingers crossed.

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