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Subject Lines

Do you remember what we said about the subject line in our earlier series of email marketing?

The function of the subject line is to get the reader to want to open your email before they delete it. It is also critical in helping to decide whether people will open your email.

The purpose of the subject line is not to sell something, that is done within the body of the email, but if it is too weak your email will not get opened.

If you give out too much information in your subject line your email will not be opened, because, you have told the reader everything they need to know, or at least enough for them to decide they are not interested in your offer.

Don't forget what your goal is! You want to entice the reader to open your email and read the contents, and they will only do this if you have enticed them, or aroused their curiosity.

Have you done enough for them to want to find out what details and benefits are contained in it that will help them.
We also said that people were in a hurry and if your subject line was not strong enough they would not even open your email.

So how do we convince them that our email is worth opening and reading?

Well the first thing we want to do is make our subject line conversational, and also arouse peoples curiosity. There is an old saying 'Curiosity Killed The Cat'. We don't want to kill our potential customers, but we do want to intrigue and interest them, so much so that they cannot delete our email before they have looked inside it.

So one of the biggest secrets in writing a good subject line is to make the reader insanely curious. If we can do this then they will at least open the email to find out what is inside.

Here are a couple of examples of subject lines.

First a subject line you would not want to use:
"{first_name}, Why you should never give away your secrets in the subject line"

This lets the reader know what is going to be in the body of the email, so they have no incentive to open it and look any further.

A far better way to put this would be:
"{first_name}, How many times have you made this mistake with your subject line"

Notice, immediately you have got the reader thinking. What mistake! If they want to know the answer they are going to have to open the email and read it.

When it comes to personalizing the subject line don't just add the persons name for the sake of it, but make sure if you are going to use their name it is used in a context that makes sense.

Here is an example of what I am talking about, the persons name is being used , but not for any valid reason

"{first_name} - The real secrets of the Vortex Marketing Group's methods."

A better way to word this to make sense of using the person's first name would be:

"Hey {first_name}, check out these 3 secrets of the Vortex Marketing method."

The reason you are using someone's name is to make the subject line conversational and at the same time make people curious.