What are the best subject lines to get your emails opened?

You could put maximum effort into an email, but it’s all for naught if the recipient doesn’t open it.

In his 2015 Annual Meeting presentation, “New research — communicating in a sound bite world (and how to get your emails opened),” financial services veteran Dan Richards, MBA, cited a study in which a company dealing with mass email campaigns analyzed 30 million emails — 30 million — to understand the subject lines that inspired people to open the email. They considered the following 10 possible subject lines:

1.       Solving team management headaches in one hour
2.       Five strategies to accelerate business results
3.       Follow-up
4.       Update
5.       Results are in
6.       How to protect your business from lawsuits
7.       Introduction
8.       Ten tips for getting customer referrals
9.       Checking in
10.       [Blank subject line]

Of these, the following all generated open rates above 85 percent:

1.       Blank subject line (92 percent)
2.       Follow-up (90 percent)
3.       Update (89 percent)
4.       Introduction (88 percent)
5.       Checking in (87 percent)

However, these subject lines had open rates below 10 percent:

1.       Solving team management headaches in one hour
2.       Five strategies to accelerate business results
3.       Results are in
4.       How to protect your business from lawsuits
5.       Ten tips for getting customer referrals

The first trick to a good subject line is keeping it to one or two words, Richards said, with more than three words dropping the open rate by 60 percent. One thing to avoid? Marketing language. “That’s why you never want to have a question mark in your subject line,” he said.

Learn about the right language to get your email read in “New research—communicating in a sound bite world (and how to get your emails opened)”

Written by Matt Pais, MDRT Content Specialist