Subject lines are your key to your prospect’s inbox. Get them right and you’ve found yourself sitting comfortably in their inbox. Get them wrong, and well, you’re in hot water with no way out. Let’s take a look at 5 embarrassing mistakes you must avoid in order to ramp up your open rates and get your emails where they need to be.
1 Mis-judging the Preview Pane
The make or break moment for all marketers. The preview pane. A sneak peek into what your email holds. It’s the deciding factor in your leads opening or deleting. Think of it as click-bait, how are you going to get your emails opened? What would you and your team open? I’ll let you into a secret, we once sent an email about our website analytics software that was so finely crafted we were sure to get a great response. Enter the preview pane, cutting off our subject line 4 letters into the word analytics and disaster struck. I’m sure you can figure out the rest. Oh well, you live and you learn.
2 To Typo or Not to Typo
Controversial to popular belief, typos happen in emails, whether they are deliberate or not. Our MD raves about the fact we sent an email out about split testing but deliberately spelt split wrong to make us sound like 90s pot-heads (spliff testing). Yes, we got a good response, and the majority saw the funny side and it went down in history, but is it really the message you want to be sending about your business. You care about your email marketing after all.
3 Pitiful Personalisation
Personalisation is key these days. We’re in the 21st century and marketers hold so many tools to collect relevant data on our leads that we should be using. The impact it has on your email marketing can be really positive. However, when it goes wrong it goes horribly wrong. No-one likes to be called the wrong name. Make sure you start off on the right foot. Data isn’t always good enough to get it right every time, so use salutation alternatives, such as “hi there”.
4 RE, FW
Back in the day, this was the sure-fire way to trick your leads into opening and engaging with your emails. Starting your subject lines with either RE: or FW: However, just like most things, everyone’s jumped on the bandwagon and rinsed this method for all it’s worth. Now we know and recognise those aren’t emails we have engaged with before. Make your leads trust you rather than annoying you in the first instance.
5 Angry & Shouty
Capitals, over-used punctuation or making your subject lines text bold and large. No-one wants to be shouted at in their own inbox. Chances are one of the following 3 actions will take place: ignore, delete, spam. Use capitalisation and punctuation cautiously. Occasionally adding words like “free” or “buy now” have been known to increase open rates but we recommend using them sparingly.
As you know at CommuniGator we love an experiment. And we don’t stop at subject lines. Download our Great British Split Test today to get involved in the biggest email marketing experiment.