BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Five Tips For Writing Effective Email Subject Lines

Forbes Communications Council

Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications for OPTIZMO Technologies.

Many email marketers consider the subject line to be the single most important factor in an email campaign’s success. I’m not sure I would go quite that far, but it is a key factor in whether your email is even opened — and generally, if a recipient doesn’t open your email, they can’t exactly engage with the content. Much like trying to catch someone’s attention in a conversation, the subject line may be your one chance to spark interest and begin a conversation. Your email content still needs to deliver on the promise of that initial introductory subject line, but the most brilliant email content won’t get a chance to amaze your audience if they never read it.

So, it makes sense for email marketers to put more than a little thought into crafting an effective subject line. Below are five useful tips to help you get a handle on your overall subject-line writing process and then write better and better subject lines over time. 

1. Follow The Rules

First and foremost, familiarize yourself with key marketing (specifically, email marketing regulations), like the CAN-SPAM Act. Specifically, CAN-SPAM prohibits deceptive subject lines. Compliant subject lines must not mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the email message. This would be a best practice even if it wasn’t required by law.

Remember that while email open rates are certainly important, your ultimate goal is to drive further engagement with your email content and eventually conversions on various offers or promotions in your emails or on your landing pages. You want the people who open your emails to actually have an interest in the content. If the subject line doesn’t connect to the content they find, they are far less likely to engage further. The rules around email subject lines are in the best interest of you and your email recipients. 

2. What Is Your Ultimate Goal?

Before you start brainstorming and writing down a bunch of email subject line ideas, you should take the time to think about the ultimate goal of your email campaign. What action are you trying to get your recipients to take with the email campaign? Are you looking to simply drive engagement (opens, clicks, etc.) or are you expecting recipients to complete a subsequent action like completing a sale or filling out a form? 

Once you know your ultimate goal for your campaign, you may find that your thinking around the subject line changes a bit when you put that goal front and center in your strategy. 

3. Follow Best Practices

Writing subject lines shouldn’t be like reinventing the wheel. Marketers have been sending email campaigns for decades. In that time, numerous articles, books, studies and other types of content have been written that help define a set of best practices for writing subject lines (and every other aspect of email marketing). Take this information into account when you’re devising your subject lines. Remember that best practices do change over time, so look for more recent content around what types of subject lines work best for the email campaigns you are sending. You will likely find both examples of effective subject lines and general guidelines for how to construct them.

4. Get Creative

So, I just suggested sticking with best practices. This is where I contradict myself — because only sticking with established best practices can also keep you from trying new and unique ideas. So, use best practices as a guide, but then don’t be afraid to get out of your comfort zone and try something new. This may extend to the entire email message, as you will want to keep the subject line compatible with your email content. But consider different approaches you may not have tried before.

If most of your emails are pretty direct and to the point, maybe consider a bit of humor. What can you do to pleasantly surprise your audience? Sometimes, it can be good to step out of character and approach your audience in a novel way to stand out from your typical emails. While consistency around your brand voice, email schedule and so on are generally good things, shaking things up just a bit can also be a big driver of engagement.

5. Test, Test And Test Some More

Regardless of what ideas you come up with and decide to try in your email subject lines, the next step is to test. Then test again and again. Email provides the ideal medium for constant testing and optimization, as it allows you to receive almost immediate feedback. So, if you are stretching your comfort zone a bit with a few different subject lines, test several of them in that next campaign.

However, there are a couple of key things to remember about testing (which might be the subject of an entire article down the road):

• Define the parameters you are testing and separate them in your campaign for easy analysis. See what built-in testing capabilities your email platform provides and leverage them to separate your subject lines.

• Try not to test too many variables at once unless you are well-versed in and equipped with tools for multivariate testing. Multivariate testing is powerful in that it allows you to test faster and optimize more quickly. But, if it gets too complex, you may find it difficult to pull actionable learnings from the tests.

• Testing is definitely not a one-and-done strategy. While every company’s email program is different, you should at least include testing in your campaigns regularly, if not in every campaign. Determine what works best for your company and marketing program and stick to it.


Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?


Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my website