Subject line plays a very important role in the success of your email campaign. If the subject line of your message reads like a subject line commonly used in spam messages then your recipients (or their email filters) will likely confuse it with spam and possibly file complaints or block your future emails. So, you have to make sure that the subject line of your messages are good enough to pass the spam filters. Also, you need to make sure that humans are convinced too to open you email newsletters. Here are some of the tips and guidelines to write best subject line for your emails:
1) Double check to avoid blank subject lines: While composing an email message sometimes we concentrate too much on the content and just forget to write the subject line. This is a common practice and I receive many emails without a subject line or some gibberish . So, when there is no subject line the email has the maximum chance of going in to the spam folder. So, the first point is to enter a subject line then go for the body of the message.
2) Use proper words and phrases: You should be very careful while selecting the words for your subject line. You need to make sure that your email newsletter doesn’t look like a promotional advertisement (even if it is). The idea is to make it look like that you are conveying a message and not over selling.
3) Never use these terms and special characters: Using terms like URGENT!, FREE!!!, Save $, Lowest Prices, Double Your Sales, !!!, ***, $$$, etc. in your subject line will likely be red flags to recipients. It is more likely that the spam filters put up by the recipients will block these type of emails in the first place.
4) Brand name: The subject line should have your brand or the company name. It’s always a good practice to enter that as the recipients will recognize it and wont just delete it or mark it as spam.
5) Make your subject line recognizable: Consider using your list name and a similar subject line each time you send a message. For example, many organizations use this format as their message’s subject line:
Weekly Newsletter: newsletter’s topic for that issue, date.
If a recipient sees something recognizable about your brand in the subject line, you will likely see an increased open rate while simultaneously reducing or eliminating spam complaints.
6) Size of the subject line: According to MailerMailer, emails with subject lines shorter than 35 characters were opened more than emails with subject lines longer than 35 characters. This data is based on aggregate statistics from over 300 million email messages sent by a sampling of over 3,000 permission based email senders. So, the best rule of thumb is to make the subject lines short and sweet rather than to make them large. But, it should not be very short also, like “Please see this”. These kind of short subject lines are often confused with spam. So how much is exactly 35 characters. For example, if you want to use: “What is the ideal size of the subject line of the newsletter?” as the subject line of your newsletter then, this has 61 characters. Now, we have to cut it short. So the ideal newsletter title would be: “Ideal size of newsletter subject line”. Now this has 37 characters. It is close to 35 now. There’s one more thing to make sure that we don’t have to make it so short that it looses its meaning in the process. So, the ideal subject line would be something less than or close to 35 characters.