Get Your Emails Opened with Subject Line Copy That Works!

When email marketing to your prospects and customers, there are a few things that are nearly impossible to predict. Email open rates tend to be one of them.

To improve open rates, we are constantly testing new subject lines. And although we’re still not perfect at writing them, we’ve learned a few lessons you can benefit from, too. (Even though you don’t sell marketing automation software!)

9 Proven Techniques to Double Your Sales
Our most popular lead generation tool is Clate Mask’s ebook, “The Edge of Success: 9 Building Blocks to Double Your Sales.” After testing subject lines, we determined “9 proven techniques to double your sales” was opened up to 4% more often than any other copy. (Even months after sending it to the same lists.)

If a subject line works, keep using it. If you come up with another idea, test a small segment of your list, but keep using the one that works best.
People like numbers and lists. But you should stick to odd numbers. 3, 7, and 9 work well.
People like secrets, techniques, and strategies. Especially if they are “scientific” or “proven.”

How to Make Millions in a Bad Economy
This is the first email we sent about our Small Business Stimulus Package. We learned to follow our own advice when we sent out emails with the subject line “How to make millions in a bad economy.” Not only did many SPAM filters pick up this email, but we didn’t have a very good open rate. We ran a test after the fact and discovered our problem.

Millions is a SPAM word. Thousands or Hundreds are both still safe to use.
Economy had just become a SPAM word. SPAM does change based on how frequently certain words are being used. In this case, everyone was using “economy” in subject lines.
We were not unique in sending a message about the economy. We didn’t have a different or better twist on it.

Did You Check This Out?
The second attempt to promote our Small Business Stimulus Package went a little better. We knew we couldn’t use the words economic, stimulus, package, or recession. So, this was our last minute “we have no idea what to write” subject line. It worked.

We sent it from each prospect’s sales rep, so it was personalized and legitimate.
People are naturally curious. As long as you don’t use this often, curiosity alone will increase your open rate.

Proof: Infusionsoft Doubles Sales
This email was sent right after completing our case study: All About Spelling. We weren’t ready to release our “proof” to the public yet, but we were thrilled with our triumph and included it in the subject line. The response was phenomenal, especially when we said in our email:

“I’ll let you in on a little secret…we did it! In fact, we way more than doubled! (But this information has not been released yet. We’re planning a lot of fanfare around the formal release of the announcement.)”

Then we tied our “secret” into the recession, and improved not only the open rate but the click through rate as well.

People love secrets. They want to be in on the next big thing, and we did that by providing them with exclusive information.
People want proof that they’re making the right decision. We didn’t even give them the details, we only told them that we had proof.

1 Hour Notice Is All We Can Give You
After two successful webinars in the same day, the sales team wanted to host a third webinar the next morning. Marketing had 90 minutes to set it up and get the word out. Although many prospects complained about the short notice, the subject line was very engaging. We sent the email to 10,000 prospects and got 200 of them on the webinar. (We didn’t track the open rate on this one. There wasn’t enough time to bother with it.)

Understand…we legitimately had two hours. This wasn’t a ploy and the email proved it. But wouldn’t this subject line make you curious?
People had to open the email NOW if they wanted to know what this was about. They couldn’t look at it and come back to it later.

Oops
A lot of betting happened about whether or not this subject line would work. It did! But it was not done on purpose. We mistakenly sent out an email that didn’t merge the prospects’ names. It read, “Hi Contact.FirstName.” We could have let it go and looked like fools, or we could send out an apology. The subject line for our apology email was simple, “Oops.” The open rate was nearly 20% greater than the subject line of the original email.

We’ll let you draw your own conclusions about this one, but it out-performed ever other subject line we’ve ever used.

Here are a few other, random things we’ve learned about subject lines:

Subject lines should be less than 50 characters
Try using power words like: power, incredible, success, etc. (Just make sure the words you use are not SPAM.)
Sometimes an explanatory subject line is best. We’ve had some good responses with simple subject lines like “You’re invited to a marketing webinar.”