Quite often business owners, entrepreneurs, and even your staff will spend countless hours worrying about the content of an email but take just minutes to consider the subject of a message.  The subject of an email is what dictates if your message even gets opened!  Imagine spending all of those hours on the content of your message only for someone to make just a single click on “delete”.

Crafting the right email subject line is akin to crafting a powerful headline that will be on a sales letter or landing page.  Taking time on a headline is always time well spent; spend that same amount of time on an email subject line and watch your open rates soar.

After sending over 1,000,000 million emails (yes small in the grand scheme of email marketing) we have uncovered patterns that result in getting people to eagerly open messages.  Some of the email subject lines we have written had our clients scratching their heads wondering “what are they thinking?” but they were happy when they noticed the response rate.

To give you the edge in crafting powerful subject lines for your emails consider two key elements.

1.  Pique Interest to Make People Want to Find Out More

To pique the interest of your prospects challenge yourself to think differently about what you are communicating.  Think of the subject line as a headline or even the beginning of a conversation; it better make you want to find out more.

Most people would write subject lines like the following:

“The End of Season Savings Event is Happening Now”

“Top 10 Reasons to Attend X Event”

These subject lines are boring and unless a prospect really trusts you won’t get opened.  Consider transforming your messages to be so different that people will have to click to find out more.  The above subject lines could certainly be the following:

“an end of season event that will make your friends jealous”

“avoid 12 months of regret, discover more about X event”

The more interest piquing your email messages the more your prospect can’t resist opening the message.  When the subject is too boring you never get a chance to share more information.  Be bold to pique interest and watch your open rates soar.

2. Be Different…in the Smallest of Details

There is no doubt that email is a great form of communication.  Just because email makes it easy to communicate though doesn’t mean it has to be boring!  As a quick test, open your email inbox right now and look at the email subject lines.

Which subject lines make you actually want to open the email?

Likely very few of the email subjects will grab your attention.   The overuse of exclamation points and capitalization makes most inboxes a maze where the machete is the delete key.  To grab the attention of your prospects be very different.

A small detail that has a big impact is the length of your email subject line.  While “standards” dictate a wide range of length, consider that a subject line that gets truncated isn’t likely to get opened.  A length of 50 characters or less is one that will give you a clear opportunity to communicate your message and get them to open your email.

Crafting the right subject line isn’t a task that is going to take three minutes.  Every time you write an email subject line you are doing far more than just spreading the word about your “brand”.  The right email subjects give you an opportunity to break through the haze of messages and reach your next customer.  Before you send that next message take a moment and see if it really does pique interest, if it would stand out in a crowd of 104 other messages and when you can answer “yes it does” then you are on the right path to success with email.