If you are not tracking open rates for any of your email marketing campaigns then you should be. If you did check your tracking numbers you may be shocked at how few of the emails that you send actually get opened.
There can be many reasons for this, and it can be very frustrating, spending time making sure your email is as good as it can be, only to see more than half your subscribers don’t even open it. However, there are some actions which you can take to improve open rates and one of the most effective is to improve the subject lines of the emails you send.
One of the most obvious reasons subject lines can impact on open rates is that many people simply scan the subject lines when checking their email, and if they like it they open the email, and if they don’t it gets trashed. This might sound brutal but it is the reality.
Making your subjects more appealing means they must first spark interest in the person looking at them and this interest can fall into one of three specific categories.
- Curiosity
- Self Interest
- Scarcity
To make someone curious enough to open your email, the subject line should normally ask a question or be an incomplete statement. The way you word the question or statement should leave enough mystery that it forces them to open the email. Here is an example:
“The end of the road for Facebook Groups?” Of course, it isn’t and once inside the email you could talk about Facebook closing groups down which have broken their rules and offering advice as to how your subscriber could setup and run their own Facebook group. You could use this format for any service or product you offer and apply worse case scenarios within your subject lines.
The next way to spark their interest could be a subject that speaks to their self-interest and talks about a benefit to them or to their business. Again, you want to be direct enough with your statement or question to get them to open the email to find out more. An example could be:
“Here’s How I Reduced My Corporation Tax By 35%” – You could apply any benefit that your product or service has to offer to this sort of subject line with words such as ‘How’, ‘Why’, ‘What’, etc at the beginning of the line. The reader will want to find out how the service benefitted you and in turn how it can benefit them too.
The third way to spark interest is a very simple one which is universally used in marketing and that is scarcity. No one wants to miss out on something that might benefit them if it is in short supply or about to end. An example might read like this:
“This ‘widget’ has transformed lives…and there’s only 23 left!”. Again, you can replace widget with any product or service you like. Don’t be afraid to use a little bit of copywriting (transformed lives) to hammer home how good the product is. Remember you want your subscribers to open the email and using weak language isn’t going to achieve that, is it?