It is never an easy task to craft an eye-catching email subject line that will make your email stand out from the email deluge a person may receive daily. The email and marketing experts often spend a little extra time on exploring excellent email subject because it will help them to boost email open rates.

So what can we do in order to find best practices for effective email subject lines?

Yes, we know it is hard and most of the people will leave the headline as the last to be written. Some people seem to be careless or just forget to add in the headline when they send out emails, especially those who are using bulk email software to send emails. After all, it’s your very first impression of the email, please make sure you don’t skip it. An email with an empty subject headline will likely get trashed or be marked as spam immediately.

Make it short and informative. That is the part where people will judge and guess how the rest of content will be in the email. So what you can do is to choose informative subject headline, make your content relevant and concise to entice the recipients to read further. Plan and keep your subject line to 50 characters or fewer is recommended.

Know your audience. Keep your audience in mind. What will interest them? One good try will be adding the recipient’s name in the subject line. You build a feeling of rapport in this way. An example to target a specific audience with localization may look like this, “Hi Jim – Make You a Part of California’s Vibrant Business Landscape” or “Mary, you’re invited to our newly opened branch at Vancouver”.

Don’t be afraid to mention your business name in headline so that it is clear to your audience who your email is from. It helps your email to stand out from the rest of the clutter in their inbox as they can prioritize the email’s importance after scanning the headline. Don’t miss the chance to reinforce your specific brand.

Stay focused and communicate clearly with your audience what your email is all about. Are you trying to call for a sale? Having a promotion? Announcing new product? Conducting a survey or feedback? Your final goal will determine what info your subject line should include and what it means for your audience. Make it clear.

Simply plan and use logical keywords for your headline. Some keywords and phrases are important for search and filtering. Use appropriate keywords related to the content of the email that will make the search easier later even if the emails were organized in different folders or tags.

You may avoid ‘spammy-looking’ keywords, such as “Free” and “Buy”. However, that’s not the main culprit causing your email being marked as spam. Punctuation like exclamation marks, question mark can be useful if you plan to engage with questions but don’t over-use it. Instead, avoid using all CAPS in your subject line. It will NOT help in drawing attention but may end up in the spam folder later.

Always bear in mind that one way to improve your email open rates is preparing stunning headline – short, descriptive, and provide the recipient with a reason to open your email.

Final recommendation from MailBoxValidator will be analyze and do research on the headlines. There are a few online tools that may help you to analyze and test how your headline performed such as Quicksprout, CoSchedule, Optimizely and so on.