12 Mar This is the subject line to use if you want people to open your emails

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you might already know that we LOVE email. Believe it or not, we’re not alone. According to a 2018 survey by Adobe, workers between ages 25 and 34 spend 6.4 hours a day checking their email. Yes, millennials are spending just about an entire workday’s worth of time checking email.

Just because they are opening emails, it doesn’t mean they’re opening yours. In Constant Contact’s yearly wrap up, they found that the average open rate for an email coming from a small or medium sized business was 16.19%. Mailchimp’s open rate was slightly higher at 21%.

Number of factors

Timing, subject line, deliverability, sender name, junk folders, they just got another email from their boss right before yours. Those are just some of the reasons why your open rate isn’t higher. Clearly, some things you can control, others you definitely can’t.

The subject line is something you can. Personalization goes a long way when it comes to making an impact, but it has to be done right and should be more than just a name. (There are more people signing up for newsletters with the name Testy McGee than you think.) Products they’ve looked at, locations they are planning to visit, or even car type can help drive those open rates up.  Campaign Monitor estimates that personalization helps increase your open rate by roughly 26%.

A/B Test the heck out of it

If you’ve ever signed up for a newsletter with two or more emails, you may have noticed you’ll receive two different subject lines for the same email. That’s because you were essentially the test dummy. Large companies and mega-email senders like The Hustle seem to be A/B testing their emails every single send. It works like this: Come up with 2 killer subject lines. Send those out to roughly 40% of your list. 20% of your list one subject line, another 20% of the list gets the other. After an hour goes by, you send the remaining 60% of your list the “winning” subject line. (The original email with the higher open rate.)

A/B tests are far from a new and innovative. However, more than 65% of brands never or rarely A/B test their automated emails, and 76% never or rarely A/B test their transactional emails. Basically, just guessing at the subject line.

There’s no perfect answer

It’s not something you want to hear but unfortunately it’s the truth. You can really drive yourself crazy trying to create the perfect subject line but throwing in keywords, personalization, sales, etc, but at the end of the day is it what your audience wants at that moment in time? That’s the only thing that matters.