Growth Tip #34: The Better Subject Line

By Pete Rakozy

Growth Tips, Reading

Think about how you would introduce yourself to someone you really wanted to meet. This could be an attractive person across the room. Or it could be someone famous. Or it could be an important potential new client. The first thing you say to them will make or break how the rest of the conversation will go. Flop that opening line and you’ll get rejected, ignored or lose the prospect.

Email subject lines are the same. They are the hook that pulls the reader into the rest of the email. If that hook fails to set then we lose that reader and the opportunity to give them the value we know they need. Writing subject lines is hard and so you need to be willing to take time to test multiple subject lines in order to create one that is compelling and persuasive. Fortunately, testing subject lines is way easier than testing pick up lines or sales openers and a simple Google search will give you lots of examples to spur your creative juices.

How to execute this growth tip

Research: read the recommended readings and get a general idea of the guiding principles of subject line writing and testing. And write down all the ideas, don't worry about them being good or bad.

By this step you should have at least 10-20 subject line ideas you want to test with email campaign you're already running. Dive into your email software and make sure you have the ability to run an A/B test on subject lines. If you don't consider moving to a different platform. We recommend ActiveCampaign which is affordable, simple and lets you A/B test subject lines, email content, images, calls to action and more.

Pick an email that is already performing well for your A/B test. You always want to improve the top-performing campaigns first to get easy quick wins then work your way to the bottom performing emails. Set up your split test and run the campaign for at least seven days. Check your metrics (open rate, click-through rate, etc.) to see if they have improved. If they have a document why you think that is and move on to round two. Repeat until you can't improve the performance anymore (or until the gains improved are too small to warrant the effort).