by Will Rotondi
It’s one of the simplest parts of your email – or so you might think.
Subject lines are often written off as a no-brainer to fill in with whatever sounds appropriate after you’ve gone ahead and crafted your message. After all, if the person you’re writing to already knows you, why does it matter how the subject actually reads? Sometimes you might even leave it blank.
However, as you may have noticed when you use email for your prospecting, subject lines are a big deal. They’re the attention-grabbers among the myriad of other emails flowing through your prospects’ inboxes. They’re the anchors that can keep those messages from hitting spam filters. They’re also very easy to misuse.
If your subject line was a book title, would you want to read it?
There can be a fine line between drafting an email subject that’s either credible, spammy, or downright indicative of fraud.
So how should you draft yours to catch your prospect’s attention and not get you in trouble? These are consistently touted as the rules of breaking the email subject line code:
- Don’t use words that are associated with common spam messages.
- Don’t make your subject lines excessively long.
- Don’t use a lot of punctuation.
- Don’t use ALL CAPS.
For an example of all four: “Don’t wait for this SALE to end – you want to BUY NOW!!!”
Here are a few additional recommendations on what you should try:
- Keep the subject line relevant to the message body. Don’t mislead your audience for the sake of a click. (That’s technically illegal, FYI.)
- Use terminology that would resonate with your target audience, but can also be understood by those outside of that audience.
- Make it sound less like it came from an email blast and more like it came from a real person. “You might want to fix that filter” sounds more naturally spoken than “7 tips on how to maintain efficient air filtration.”
