You have invested in a brilliant marketing and content team to come up with a great email campaign for your latest product line. The creative’s look great and the content reads enticing. Come the D day, and your campaign kicks off. From building attractive content and designing to making sure you have done your market research to serve your ads to genuine and high potential consumers, you believe you have set up a strong background for a successful email campaign. However, when the results are, you find that your email campaign, on which you had set such high hopes, failed to make any impact. The conversions rates are extremely low and the email click rates are disappointing. Why is it that despite apt messaging and superior segmenting, the campaign failed to make an impact?? The answer may be because you did not pay attention to your email subject line!

As measly as email subject lines sound, they play a vital role in engaging readers to click on the email, for after all the email subject line is the first thing that any reader sees. Everyone gets a number of emails everyday and chances that the user will miss your email or may completely choose to ignore is high. The challenge is, no matter how good your creative/newsletter/ad is, the consumers will judge the email by its subject line.


According to research done by Convince and Convert, 33% of email recipients decide if they are going to open your email or not based on only the subject line and 69% of email recipients also report email as spam based solely on the subject line. This research clearly points out how important email subject lines are. The one line email subject line is essentially the first impression of the brand and surely you want it to be precise, action-oriented and most of all, you want your readers to read it and click on the email.

Here are 3 tips that you can keep in mind when creating an effective email subject line that can boost your email opening rates:

1) Short, sweet and simple:
The whole point of an email subject line is to communicate the entire email message in one short and precise line. Keeping this objective in mind, create a line, of approximately 50 characters to succinctly but effectively convey your message and attract the readers into opening the mail. Avoid using terms such as newsletters or updates which may lead the readers to believe that your email is boring or lengthy.

2) Call to action in disguise:
Think of email subject line as call to action. Just as you use actionable language and create a sense of urgency to propel the user to clicking your content, similarly, try to spark interest by weaving short and simple lines that convey how your readers can benefit by opening the email.

3) Personalization:
Little touches of personalization can go a along way in enticing readers to click on emails that may otherwise go ignored.. For example, instead of sending a generic happy birthday wish to your consumers, you can add the name such as “Happy Birthday XYZ” to create more engagement and a feel good factor around your brand. According to a research, including a name in the subject line boosted open rates by 29.3%. You may also use pre-written personalized email messages on regular intervals by using campaign management solution for effective email marketing strategy.

Another way that you can personalize your email subject lines is by sending consumers location specific emails. Using the right technologies, you can get access to consumers’ current location and based on this real time data, you can send them relevant emails with extremely specific subject line.