Email Subject Must NOT Trigger Email Blocking
The first step in order to get your email read is to have your email land in the recipient’s Inbox instead of the Spam or Bulk folders, hence the email subject must have a low email spam score to avoid the email blocking on the way from the sender to the final recipient
(your target reader).
To ensure a smooth delivery and avoid the email block, you should keep in mind a few good email subject lines best practices, such as:
Spam Subject – Shouldn’t Be Used Ever!
Don’t use HTML subject lines written in CAPITALS ONLY!
It is similar to when someone yells at you – I would delete such an email promptly as soon as I’d get a glimpse at its subject line.
Don’t use spammy subject lines filled with crazy characters like the one below:
.•*`¯¯`*•. . . CAN YOU SAY, FREEDOM??? IS THIS YOU? . . .•*`¯¯`*•.
Nothing screams ‘spam subject‘ louder than these…
The first thing someone will do IF somehow the spam email manages to get through the email spam filters along its way… is to delete it.
So in the end, you not only risk being blacklisted for this behavior, but you will get no benefit from these spam emails, anyway - nobody reads them.
If you’re not sure (although the example above is pretty obvious) run your email through a spam trap software or anti-spam service to determine your email spam score.
As a rule of thumb, try to keep your spam scores as low as possible. There is no accepted standard, each service has its own rules. Read carefully to see what is the maximum upper spam limit and keep safely below that.
Write Clever Email Subject Lines
Finally, don’t use too many punctuation signs. It is unnatural to send an email to a friend and end it with 2 or 3 exclamation marks, isn’t it?
A question mark, though, is different – it helps build curiosity and the desire to open the email and find the answer.
To write catchy subject lines for emails you should try to raise your readers curiosity. Leave something only suggested instead of full disclosure…
(isn’t innuendo always more powerful than direct proposals?)
Ask a question, give them a hint of what they’ll find inside the email body, but keep the subject line clean and as short as possible.
A length of maximum 20 words would be a good upper limit, but keeping it under 5 is far, far better.
The best subject lines for email marketing are designed with only one purpose in mind – make the reader open the email.
Best Marketing Headlines for Good Email Subjects
To come up with good email subjects you should first start by looking around to the media.
Newspaper Headlines would be a very good starting point.
Remember, the writers are trained professionals who know how to write the perfect headline to make people curious and want to read more on the following page.
This is very similar to follow up email marketing, where the email subject headline is followed in many email clients by a short excerpt (the part that people would be able to see in the email preview pane) that is specifically designed to make them willing to read more.
The newpaper headlines are followed by a short text excerpt of the article itself, to give the reader a glimpse of what is all about and then it simply says you should read the rest on page 16…
…the same technique is also applied on blog posts where there is sometimes a [more tag] that would split the post allowing the reader to follow it on a separate page.
Writing email subject lines is no different from writing the best headlines for newspapers or magazines.
You only need to be creative and inject into them some human passion and feelings, especially to be able to raise curiosity, but sometimes also envy or greed, etc…
Professional Email Subject Lines Writers Always Test The Results
Whatever your idea for the best email subject lines would be, it is always clever to test before sending to a large number of people.
Email segmenting and subject lines split testing are the best practices these days, but I have a trick to share that I’m always using even before testing on real people.
The Advanced Marketing Institute Group has a tool on their website to help analyze headlines and email subject lines and give them a score based on three different segments:
- Intellectual
- Empathetic
- Spiritual
The Emotional Marketing Value (EMV) – as they call it – has a maximum value of 100, but common headlines
only reach values of up to 25-30% usually.
On their website there is a…
…free testing tool that I found to be an excellent resource as my
email subject line tester.
Go for it, play with it for a while, try to get the higher EMV possible score.
Then post your findings on the comments below.
I have written a 100 EMV headline that I will share with you later, as a prize for reading all these, but till then, let’s play with it for a while first.
Let’s find together, the best email subject head line ever!
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