How To Write A Good Email Newsletter Subject Line

In the short term, the purpose of an email subject is to get your recipient to open the email. In the long term, the purpose of an email subject line is to position you & your emails, and to make sure your recipients keep reading your emails week after week. Here are five quick tips for writing effective subject lines.

1. Catch Your Recipient’s Interest

This doesn’t necessarily mean be ’salesy’. Using the same, simple subject line every week can work, as long as your emails continue to be valuable to your recipients. The same goes for leading on news, offers, information of interest. What are your customers interested in? Telling your customers that your email contains something of interest to them & following that up will reap benefits.

2. Use Your Brand

If you’re afraid of letting your customers know that the email is from you, then you’re doing something badly wrong elsewhere.

3. Don’t Sound Like Spam

Over the past few months you may have noticed subject lines on spam emails becoming less obvious. Spammers eventually got wise to the fact that their “Huge Gains In Only 5 Days” subject lines made them easily identifiable as spam. This is something you can learn from: While leading on benefits can offer great results, be careful not to sound like a traditional spam email. Look like a spammer & people will assume you are a spammer.

4. Don’t Oversell Your Content

While having a boastful, overselling subject line may increase your short-term open rates, if the content doesn’t live up to the promise your recipients will feel cheated. That leads to lower conversions & more unsubscribes in the short term, and damaged trust & lower open rates in the long term.

5. Follow It Up Immediately

That point could be reworded “make sure your customer realises you aren’t overselling your content”: If your subject line does include reference to a news item, an offer, or a specific piece of content, make sure that item is plainly visible as soon as the email is opened (and that may mean opened in the preview pane). The simplest way to follow up your subject line is to start the email content with a very closely related headline. For example: your subject is “Apple Releases New iPods”, your content could begin with the headline “Today Apple Released New 100GB, 150GB iPods”.