Don Polletta, VP Marketing

We all know the importance of a well constructed email message when it comes to selling your products and services. The standard format goes along the lines of presenting a problem, leading up to a solution, announcing your product, and listing its benefits. Then a well crafted call-to-action will hopefully at least get the majority of message recipients to take the next step (making a phone call, filling out a contact form, visiting a web-site)

But what if something seemingly inconspicuous as the email subject line was making the decision between ‘open’ and ‘delete’ that much easier? This of course can work in either a positive or negative manner. The best practices for concocting an email subject heading are to make it short, ask a question, convey a sense of urgency, and to be specific.

Beyond those details, the actual words you use within the email subject heading can either raise the recipients’ interest or drive it away negatively. Making the email short and asking a question are rather self-explanatory, but to convey a sense of urgency and to be specific use these words to drive the point home:

• Exclusive
• Alert
• Limited
• Breaking
• Update
• Daily
• Weekly
• Sale

Even if your email is going out to thousands of recipients, when these words pop up in their inbox it will feel like a customized and privileged offer.

So what are the words that are going to drive people to send your message to the spam folder seconds after receiving the new mail notification? Words that we’ve come to associate with scams plus letters and symbols that don’t ‘look pretty’ are proven to have negative connotations in email subject headers:

• Free
• Discount
• Trial
• News
• Report
• Learn
• “X” % Off
• “?”

Understandably there seems to be a thin gray line between words that would be deemed positive and ones that incite negativity. “Daily” for example increases focus whereas “today” is considered a negative email subject term.

What we want to do is raise awareness about a particular reason why your email marketing may not be reaching its projected forecast. Sometimes it’s not the message you necessarily need to change, but how it is delivered. Now that we have the subject line nailed next month we will cover simple formulas for writing email.