10 Catchy Email Subjects to Increase Open Rates

Email subject lines are often neglected.  Generally, once the email body content is complete, not nearly enough time is spent on the subject line.  However, if you want your emails to get noticed and increase open rates, you need to put more focus on the email subject lines.

Often marketers end up using subject lines that are too fancy or they go for ones that they think are funny, but end up falling flat.  A balance between formal and informal subject lines is important.

The bottom line is, good email subject lines result in more people opening the email and higher open rates result in more sales.  To help you avoid neglecting your subject lines, here are 10 ways to make them more catchy:

1. “10 Best pizzerias in Boston” 

   Personalized subject lines increase open rates by 50% according to Marketing Dive.  In the above example, this marketer knows that the target of the email likes pizza and lives in the Boston area.  Though, studies show that throwing the name of the email recipient into the subject is automatically thought of as spam by most readers.

2. “Can’t wait for the day to be over?”
   

   Question marks and other punctuation in email subject lines can be very attention-grabbing and useful.
   Exclamation marks can be used, but tend to be overused these days, so you may want to think outside the usual punctuation box to find some fun symbols or unusual punctuation to attract ‘dem eyeballs.

3. “Need an excuse to get away?”
   

   Pain points of your target audience are a great way to get their attention if you know them.  If your target is a working parent of three, the example above is a great way to get their attention.

4. “Here are some grill accessories to go with your recent grill purchase”
   

   Transaction histories can give you a great deal of information about your existing customer and the perfect excuse to get in touch with them again.  Personalizing them with recent purchase history information will let them know you’ve done your homework and are interested in your customer’s loyalty.

5. “Last chance | 30% off”
   

   A sense of urgency in your subject line will play on your customers’ fear of missing out (FOMO) and their natural curiosity and get them to want to open it up.  Anyone that’s a sucker for a good deal and a touch of the FOMO will want to open an email with this type of subject line.

6. “Use Google Sync? Get ready!”
   

   Following trends and making them part of your subject will let your readers know that you keep up with the latest trends and are relevant.  Plus, the above subject may intrigue them because, if they currently do use Google Sync, what news are they about to hear about it? Is it going away?  Getting improvements? Was it hacked and I have to worry about cybersecurity issues?

7. “Start your future NOW”

   Using Capital letters to emphasize one word in your subject line can help bring attention to it.  Using too many capital letters will have the opposite effect, but emphasizing one word to bring attention to a time or emotion will help.
   

8. “We ❤ you”
   

   Emojis can be attention-grabbing and can set the tone of the email.  Plus, emojis are so often used in communications in this day and age that you may seem more relevant and fun.  You can also try smiles or food, if they make sense for your business. The old-school analog ones will even do the trick.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

9. “Yep, this is a product update email”

   Being straightforward can be so different that it helps you stand out.  It is more effective than a boring subject line and gets right to the point, while being just a little bit silly.  This is a good option if you just can’t think of one of these other clever ideas and are running out of time.
   

10. “Got plans for Friday?”
    

    Questions tend to make the reader think about the answer and may intrigue them enough to open up the email.  It may also play with their FOMO once again as they will want to know if you are letting them know that there is some amazing event coming up on Friday that they won’t want to miss.  You never know.

There are effective ways to test your email subject lines by doing some A/B testing and see which ones people tend to open more.  Send the same email to two groups of people with two different subject lines and see which one is opened more. It’ll be worth it to do your own testing before sending it to larger audiences. 

Also, if you have two different types of audiences, but want to send them all the same email, you should consider personalizing the email subject for each group.  For instance, let’s take the example of the working parent above. If you are selling travel, and are enticing them with an excuse to get away from their hectic schedules, it won’t appeal to the single person with lots of time and money.  For them, you may switch it up to say “Ready for your next adventure?” or something similar to break the monotony instead of to getaway.

In order to effectively manage all of these different types of customers who will receive specific communications from your business, many organizations rely on tools such as email marketing software or, more effectively, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

Agile CRM by 500apps is one such CRM that features a very effective email marketing tool.  This particular tool allows you to create and send professional emails and newsletters, personalize them, then track and analyze your results.  And, since it already integrated into the CRM system, all of your customer contacts will be readily available   

Email marketing continues to prove to be an effective tool in marketing.  However, it is also still popular enough that it is difficult to get noticed over the noise.  Using some of these suggestions for catchy email subject lines will help you and your business get noticed.  If you would like to see if Agile CRM can help you with your email marketing needs, try it free for 30 days.