Subject Lines Live – Best of August 2021

What kind of subject lines were getting the world of B2B buzzing in August 2021? Here’s our regular dive into the number behind our Subject Lines Live data.

Today’s freshest subject lines can be found here.

The Top 5

Product Catalogue 2021

This subject line works well for 2 main reasons; it offers value, and it isn’t pushy.

In “That Telephone Sales Episode” of That Marketing Podcast, Anthony Stears uses the analogy of takeaway pizza menus to explain a smart B2B approach. By making information available, but respecting your reader’s need to engage with it at their own pace, you position yourself to be front of mind when they are looking for what you sell.

Congratulations on achieving the Stellify Award!

As an internal team at Spotler, a lot of our attention gets focused on generating and warming new leads. But it’s important not to forget about your existing customers!

The Stellify Award is a program run by a red brick university, rewarding students for volunteering, leadership, and sustainability activities done outside of normal studies.

With students facing huge disruption for the second year in a row, active encouragement and congratulation goes a long way in recreating the sense of community that universities try to foster. Adapting engagement programs in this way is a key to reducing churn, in a time when many businesses are finding it harder than usual to drive new sales.

Please confirm your opt in

Double Opt-In was very popular as soon as GDPR hit, but it was quickly overtaken by Legitimate Interest as marketers scrambled to preserve their audiences.

However, the fact that this subject line converted over half of its readers shows that it is still used as a method.

When a person has both filled in a form on your site and clicked the link in the follow-up email, you have iron-clad proof that they are happy to receive your emails. Using this method will result in a smaller audience than Legitimate Interest, but a much more engaged one. You need to decide which side of this trade-off is best suited to your marketing.

#[Person/FirstName]#, we are here to continue supporting your industry

With restrictions easing and the numbers of ‘double-jabbed’ people rising, it is starting to feel like life is returning to pre-pandemic norms.

The negative side of this is a fear that accommodations put in place by suppliers may be removed before businesses have fully recovered. Offering reassurance that your support mechanisms will continue eases that worry from your audience and leaves a strong positive impression.

Embedding an Operational Risk Management Framework – White Paper Download

Full disclosure, this author has no clue how to embed an operational risk management framework. And that’s entirely the point.

Subject lines do well when they speak the reader’s language. When Spotler send email campaigns to marketing managers, we don’t talk about APIs or website coding. We focus on easily measuring engagement and accurately segmenting audiences.

The best of the rest

Personalisation

Personalisation remains rarely used in the overall highest performers, appearing in just 14.29%. This represents a significant uptick from July’s 10%.

However, subject lines which did include personalization scored slightly higher on average than those that did not (11.31% vs. 10.8%).

Emoji

Emoji only appear in 2% of August’s subject lines, the same level as July.

The difference in performance is wider than for personalization. The average CTR for emoji subject lines was 16.81%, compared to 10.76% for emoji-less ones.

Sender Company Name

50% fewer subject lines than the previous month included the sender company’s name, and those that did performed less well on average (8.63% CTR vs. 11.06%).

Length (Characters)

For the 4^th consecutive month, subject lines of 41-50 characters lead the highest performers. None of our top senders managed to squeeze their message into fewer than 11 characters, while a growing number went over the 100-character mark. The longest this month was a whopping 211 characters!

“Slugcatcher revisits the BHP/Woodside merger, a deal too advanced to stop; Oil Search Santos $21B merger is go; Chevron back in black second quarter running; Oz LNG market share too big to fail in China, and more”

Type

The number of newsletters breaking into the top 5 continues to grow. The most likely reason for this is that once you have clearly delivered value in your first newsletter, you get momentum. Regularity is particularly important with this kind of send, so consider before you start whether a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly newsletter will suit the amount of content and depth of analysis you can reliably turn out.

The rest is up to you!

How does this data compare to what you’ve seen in your own tests? If you’re already a Spotler customer, run your own tests and you might see yourself in these write-ups.

If you aren’t, you should be! Set up a demo with our Sales team here.