How To Optimize Your Email Subject Title For Better Email Open Rate

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. And opt in to my newsletter (see form on the left) - and get goodies waiting for ya! Thanks for visiting!

For us email marketers, one of the key metrics we track is the open rate.

How do we define open rate?

Say you send out an email to 100 people. If 1 of those open up your email, it is an open rate of 1%.

The open rate gives you a good indication of how well your email campaign is going. And how your subscribers are responding to you.

There are many ways to increase your open rate, but today I’m gonna talk about how to optimize your email subject title - probably one of the single most important elements that drives open rates - as one of the ways.

Truth be told, these techniques I’m about to reveal to you are so simple, you might laugh and say these are nothing new.

But remember - simple works.

Let’s go in details…

1. Include the word ‘you’ in the title if you can…

2. Incorporate ‘benefit’ and ‘curiosity’ element in your subject headline

Talk in terms of everyone favorite radio station - WIIFM - “What’s In It For Me”. And invoke their curiosity enough to prompt their itchy finger to click through.

3. End off your subject headline with 3 triple dots (”…”)…

This is to create a “to be continued” feeling that you will compel your reader to want to click to find out more…

4. Include your branding in front of the subject headline. For example, your company name is “Profitable Marketing”, then your headline can start with “[Profitable Marketing] Headline xxxxx….”

The front branding tag is to allow your subscribers to immediately identify that the email is coming from you. Once they know you well enough, they will start clicking through more consistently.

Also having the front tag differentiates your email from the sea of other emails in your subscribers’ inbox.

There. Find them useful? Got more to add? Let me know. I’m all ears…

All Success,

Popularity: 15% [?]

Share This

hi there. nice suggestions. and no, i m not laughing, its just that sometimes we need to be reminded of certain things.good work there buddy.

Hi Daniel,

Thanks for dropping by. And not laughing. =)

Glad you like the tips.

Cheers,
Jag

Hi there. I think that we could add another thing, first of all i’ll better avoid advertising typical words, be creative and don’t use the same advertising topics “there is a prize for you!”, try to make something more like “”company name”:a new car for you if…” i’m according with the article about the triple dots, better than ! now people have associated the exclamation with advertising, so avoid them and use the triple dots, preceed by an if or something that invites the user to read more.
The company name could be a good choice but only when you are a recognized company not if you’re new, your name could be nonsense to many users, so use carefully this item.
Hope to have added something useful, and congratulations for the good article!

hi jag. it so happens sometimes that u have to remind ur family members to come down to dinner 100 times b4 they finally settle down.

The best results I’ve ever received had the word “Sex” in the title… other than that “RE: something” usually works OK

Hi Daniel,

The ‘R.E’ bit sounds innovative! Not thought about that before!

I certainly won’t use ’sex’ in the title for my subject, because it can be misleading. And it may be caught by the spam filter.

But yes, the word ’sex’ is very appealing.

Good input Daniel!

Thanks!

Jag

Thanks for this great reminders and suggestions. Also personalize your email. That could help also.

hi jag. there is a service called wordtracker. it requires certain fees, but it presents a very in-depth keyword analysis. but its always not necessary that the most popular keyword be the strength of ur title. u need to mix them up so that u have a good strength which reflects on SERPs.

nicely articulated points there.

Statistically, some people may be looking at a screen full of ads. Which is an instant turn-off, so these guys may be as well counted as never-gonna-convince-them.

Somewhere in between is the spam-conscious man. He is aware he is not going to open it, and if he does, he just looks a bit and goes “sheesh, ads, bye”. Might be lured if it doesn’t oversell from the first 10 title letters.

Then comes the lazy guy sitting in his office. Oh, this one is going to be nice and open it? Just for fun? Just out of boredom? Chances are even. But this guy really needs a good attractive title to lure his trigger-finger (oh, clicky-finger works better). A pun, a letter inversion, something deeply out-of-the-box works fine.

Last guy is the one expecting your email. No need to convince him, he’s already eager to eat it. Ah well, wake me up.

Thing is, there’s no perfect recipe for any target. Once you refine the portrait of your average reader, you can talk precision!

Hi Emirhan,

True. Different people react differently to the title. Spammy ad like title gets the bin faster than most.

While it is hard to put a perfect recipe as you mentioned to this, there is no doubt that the email title plays a significant part in open rate conversion.

Cos that’s the first thing they gonna see before they even read your email!

Thanks for your lengthy comments.

Jag

very helpful points.

While this is a help, and shows me another side of optimization other than SEO, it also gave me some tips on emails to avoid in the future, no offense to your hard work.

nice very helpfull points

Hi Gus,

No offense taken. Just curious. These tips are to help you optimize your open rates - so that your prospects/customers/subscribers can read the value you wanna give them.

Not intended for the benefit of spammers.

Jag

Great suggestions. Thanks so much!

-Sasha

There is a strong need for “Optimizing Email Subject Titles” and this article explains it very well. Thanks for sharing.

Great tips! I always try to be very concise with what the email is about, but yet keep it short. I will throw in some of your ideas and see if that increases my open and hopefully response rate.

It seems like e-mail marketing has died down. Spam used to be a big thing, but spam protection advanced and people just stopped complaining about it.

There really isn’t a great way to make it happen because the large majority of people will delete anything they don’t recognize as from a person or site they know.

Hi JBourne,

I think I’ve got to make things clear from the start.

I’m a believer in permission-based and double opt-in marketing. High response rates are a result of people who actually gives you permission to email them.

I’m talking from a real email marketer perspective who have gained permission rather than a spammer.

It’s a pity many people still think of email marketing as spamming. I guess spammers has really given email marketing a bad name.

That doesn’t take away the fact that email marketing is a very effective and cost-efficient marketing platform as many marketing statistics will show.

Cheers,
Jag

I have also found that if you can include the person’s name (preferably the first name) in the subject of the email you will get a much better open rate. And like Jag Foo said, be sure not to include any terms than seem “spammy”.

Hi NYC Lawyer,

Good point! Yes, I do use personalized names in my email subject title. It helps!

Cheers,
Jag

great point the subject and title!

This is really something that I need to work on. I tend to spend hours crafting the perfect email, then just slap on a crappy subject and send!