6 Tips to Creating Irresistible Email Subject Lines

Despite all of the changes that continue to happen in the digital world, one thing is for sure – email marketing is here to stay! Email marketing is a highly effective and highly targeted way to communicate with leads, customers, subscribers, or anybody that you want to send a message to. However, one of the first mistakes people make (potentially ruining their entire email marketing campaign) is the subject line. Subject lines are important because they can be the defining factor as to whether someone will actually open or read your email, or not. Here at DigitUX, we’ve created 6 best practice tips for creating an irresistible subject line formula.

1. Call to Action (CTA)

There’s no point in sending an email if there is nothing pushing the user to take your desired course of action. A clear CTA will entice the user to engage in the offer you are presenting. The CTA should create a sense of urgency and stand out on the page to maximise its chances of a conversion. In the example on the right, Dropbox has created a very clear and enticing CTA with a large blue button in the middle of their email. By clicking the button that says “Claim Now” – there is no confusion to the user, and it even tells users there’s no waiting around involved – it will happen “Now”.

2. Music to People's Ears

Time is precious and you only have a matter of seconds to capture people’s attention before they scroll past or hit the delete button. To help capture their attention, use words such as ‘New’, ‘Free’, ‘Sneak Peak’ and ‘Discount’. These all do a great job of capturing the user’s attention and encourage them to open your email – Just don’t overdo it!

3. Stay Off the Beaten Track

There’s a fine line between being ‘music to someone’s ears’ and pushing them away with overused buzz words. By ‘overused buzzwords’, we mean things like ‘great deal’, or ‘world’s best’. While these buzzwords might have worked once upon a time, the consumers of today’s world are more skeptical and require more convincing. For instance, if you use the phrase ‘World’s best’ – who is this according to? If you’re going to make a claim, you better make sure that you can at least back it up with some credible justification.

4. KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)

This classic marketing term is perfect for lots of things, especially email subject lines. You don’t get much room in the subject box before being cut off, so keeping your text short and sweet is the key. Give readers enough information to entice the click to open the email so that they read more. Don’t over-think them – KISS and send!

5. Test & Experiment

Just because you’ve always used a particular subject line for an email campaign, it doesn’t mean that’s the one you should continue to use every time. Marketing is all about testing in order to continue to improve results – in this case, email open rates. With so many free email marketing tools out there like MailChimp, you can perform A/B split tests to find out how your go to email subject line compares with something new. Then you can find out once and for all, which email subject line is the highest converting and then try to outperform that subject next time around.

6. Check it Twice

You’ve probably received or heard stories about emails being sent to the wrong people or have the wrong information in them. This can be quite embarrassing for businesses and very inconvenient for customers. Before sending your next email campaign, ask a colleague or a friend to do a quick check-over. For something that takes only 5 minutes, it can really mean the difference between success and failure! After all, you don’t want your new irresistible subject line to go to waste now, do you? Got a handy email tip? Had a bad experience with email marketing? Let us know in the comments.