No matter how good your email copy sounds, if your recipient leaves the email unopened in the inbox, you won’t yield much from your campaigns.
And your email subject line plays a vital role in ensuring that your emails are read.
So you need to actively ensure that you create subject lines that will lead your email recipients to open your message and potentially convert.
Your subject lines have to follow the following principles.
It has to draw attention.
Subject lines that are original and engaging end up capturing the attention of readers.
Avoid overused terms and clichés, and instead, entice them with incentives that urge them to read your email.
Shorter is better.
Because these subject lines must rapidly capture the recipient’s attention, keeping them succinct yields the best results.
Subject lines with 50 characters or less have a 12% higher open rate and a 75% better CTR than those with longer subject lines.
It needs to create trust.
It is vital that you win your audience’s trust to get your message over.
Your subject line has to provide value.
A subject line that communicates value to a customer works best. It must be convincing enough so that the customer’s life is improved with what you’re offering.
Fortunately, you don’t have to start from scratch in creating your subject lines.
There are types of tried and true subject lines that you can benchmark on.
In this section of the email marketing hub, you will learn the different types of email subject lines that will ensure that you get the conversions you want.
Here are 4 types of email subject lines that encourage people to read your emails.
- Blind or Curiosity Subject Lines
- Direct or Benefit Subject Lines
- Urgency or Scarcity Subject Lines
- Proof of Results Subject Lines
Let’s discuss each of them.
Blind or Curiosity Subject Lines
Blind or curiosity email subject lines are purposefully ambiguous subject lines designed to stimulate your receivers’ interest.
For example, your subject line could be “You’ll never guess how much I earned yesterday.”
It doesn’t say anything about what happened to the sender or what the email is about. Instead, it withholds certain data from the recipient, motivating them to open it out of curiosity.
If your subject line is something like “I earned $80,000 yesterday from crypto” the recipient may already qualify your message as either interesting to them them or not.
But going the blind route, people will not use the subject line of your email to gauge whether or not they open it.
This is because it does not reveal the actual topic of your email. Instead, they’ll make a selection based on how curious they are to find out what happened.
Here are some more excellent examples.
Direct or Benefit Subject Lines
Direct or benefit subject lines are exactly what they sound like. They directly state what benefit you are getting from reading the email.
For example, “Congratulations! You qualify for a free subscription upgrade.”
It doesn’t hide anything but tells you exactly what you will have. And since people like getting benefits or anything of value, this type of subject line is excellent at getting your emails to be read.
Here are some more examples.
Urgency or Scarcity Subject Lines
Most consumers fear missing out on things. They want to avoid being the one who isn’t in with something.
This is why creating urgency or scarcity subject lines for your emails are excellent. They make people feel like they have to act now or else suffer the loss of an opportunity.
Here are some examples.
Proof of Results Subject Lines
You need to earn your readers’ trust if you are going to continue having them subscribed to your email list and engaged with your business.
To do this, you can use subject lines for your emails that show evidence of your product’s benefits to customers. And you can use proof of results subject lines to do so.
You want to show that experts and customers think positively about your company or are satisfied with your products or services. And the recipient will most likely think that if you are good enough for them, then you’re probably excellent to do business with.
Here are some examples.
Excellent subject lines can increase your chances of getting the clicks you want.
Your subject line gives your reader a primary impression of the rest of your email. It will directly affect whether or not they will open your message.
So you have to ensure that you create ones that move people’s emotions, be it via curiosity, benefits, FOMO or evidence of success.