Archive for July, 2009
The Perfect Subject Line does not exist. There is no special formatting involved and no magical formula for the most single important line in your entire newsletter. Your newsletter may never be opened and read if the Subject line doesn’t grab the interest of email recipient: even though they subscribe to your newsletter.
How do you write an inviting Subject Line, one where your reader wants to open and read your email every time you send them a message? Some emails “experts” recommend using a personalized Subject Line to grab the reader’s attention. The other “experts” suggest personalization, such as using your reader’s first name in the Subject line is a Spammer’s tactic. So who is right and who is wrong?
There is an abundance of research on the Internet discussing the importance of Subject Line etiquette, covering a cornucopia of what you must do to what you shouldn’t do when composing your newsletter Subject Line. You can find studies on Subject Line structure, the use of capital letters, character set utilization, informal or formal wording, long or short Subject Lines and whatever else is deemed to have an impact on the open rate statistics. With all this time and emphasis placed on Subject Line Science, you can only conclude it is important enough to write it correctly; after all you probably based your email reading decisions on it too.
Your decision to open email when it’s delivered to you is based on the Subject Line. Let’s say you receive an email with the Subject You Won the Russian Lottery; you may think, more SPAM, and in the trash it goes. Or you may have a SPAM filter that automatically tosses any email in the trash with the word Lottery in the Subject Line, so you never see the message. On the other hand if you had subscribed to a Russian Lottery newsletter, it might not be SPAM, in fact you were probably expecting such an email so the subject causes you to open the email instead of deleting it. You can then conclude from your own experience, one factor leading to reading or deleting email is the Subject Line.