How to Write Effective Email Subject Lines

Subject lines are the most important part of any email, especially if you are distributing cold sales emails. If an email isn’t opened, it didn’t exist. If your subject line fails to make your recipients open the email, everything else you do doesn’t matter.

Here’s how to craft subject lines that compel recipients to open emails.

Write like a human being

Make it feel like it’s written by one person for another, not like it’s written by a marketing department to a prospect. Write like you’re someone writing an email to someone else.

Avoid fancy, formatted emails filled with marketing speak. It’s the first thing recipients delete or archive unread when skimming through their inbox and that’s not what you want to happen to your email.

Avoid marketing slogans

“The VA Hub: The Best in Ages”. Many people think a “business email” is supposed to look like this. But if you want people to read your emails, avoid it.

Lowercase text

Don’t capitalize every word. Writing in lowercase text increases email open rates, probably because when people write personal emails, they often don’t capitalize each word.

Use their name

A simple and widely used element of successful subject lines is including the recipient’s first name.

Misspellings

This is a subject line hack that few people use, but as odd as it may seem, using a misspelling can actually increase open rates. Slapdash misspellings that indicate you were typing it hurriedly are a better choice than those that indicate you don’t know how to spell.

Example:

“Cna we meet today?” (tells the recipient you hurriedly typed it in)

Ask questions

Questions in subject lines increase open rates. Asking the right questions is an art, and the better you get at it, the more you sell. Use the power of questions in your subject lines as well.

Your first sentence

Most email inboxes nowadays actually display the first sentence or so of the email body in addition to the subject line. This is another opportunity for you to get your email opened, and you should craft it with your subject line in mind.

Keep your promises

Once you start getting creative with subject lines, it’s easy to get tempted to go too far. Certain subject lines might get you amazing open rates, but you need to look at more than just this one metric. Instead, consider the overall funnel. A lot of cold emailing nowadays is done with deceit. If you mislead people to get an email opened, they’ll read your email, mark it as spam. Nothing is gained from that.

Most salespeople’s emails get deleted, marked as spam or ignore because they look just like every other sales email—there’s nothing unique to catch the prospect’s interest.  Sales pros, on the other hand, know how to write an email subject line that stands out, breeds excitement, and makes the significance of the message immediately clear.

All The VA Hub VAs receive training to improve their email marketing skills. Set up an appointment to interview one of them today!

Call us now at 1-888-923-9323

Email us at businessadvisors@thevahub.com