Email subject lines. What’s your technique?

[JWM]

I was sitting at my computer a few days ago to send an email to a local business of which I want to provide my services to. I was staring at the subject line and wondered how I was to going to go about writing it.

The email was successful and I received a quick, positive response. But it got me thinking about some of the email subject line techniques you might use when trying to secure clients particularly in the B2B world when simply trying to initiate a conversation with those clients. How do you go about standing out and not coming off as spammy or similar?

Would love to hear your stories, successful or otherwise

 

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[SEBASTlAN]

sumo.com/stories/best-email-subject-lines

 

[Bekit]

Basic:
The subject line should indicate what's in the body of the message while evoking curiosity. Use the same approach you'd use to write a compelling headline.

Keep in mind that you only have a limited number of characters before most mobile devices will cut off the rest of what you've written. Keep it short.

More advanced:
One thing I always want to go for is a pattern interrupt.

In other words, something unexpected.

Think about black Friday emails. I don't know about you, but I got a million "LAST CHANCE" emails. Boring. How can you do something fresh and different?

A good idea to get your creative juices flowing is to set up a burner email where you selectively subscribe to mailing lists of great copywriters and other companies who write regular emails. Look at their subject lines. Which ones catch your eye? Think about why they do. What characteristics do they share? Can you mimic the patterns you see?

 

[Charnell]

For cold email, I keep my subject lines simple and to the point. What's the content of your cold email? Summarize it in 4 words.

I don't attempt any type of trickery like including RE: in the subject line or use any generic "quick question" or "could you use this?" type overused subject line. Open rates are a vanity metric if you're tricking people into opening your emails.

Experiment with going all lowercase in the subject line, the first word capitalized, and all words capitalized. Sometimes I get a better response rate with an all-lowercase subject line. Less formal/this-came-from-a-business I'm guessing.

 

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