Subject Fields In E-mail Marketing

For an e-mail marketing campaign to be successful, you need to think like and put yourself in the shoes of your average recipient. We’ve all been there. You check the inbox of your email account and you immediately weed out and delete the annoying spam. You want the personal e-mails from your friends or important e-mails that you have asked for (job alerts or order confirmations, for example) and you click-click-click/delete-delete-delete all the other trash without doing anything more than glancing at the sender and subject field – you certainly don’t open them or read them. In an e-mail marketing campaign, there is little point sending newsletters or e-mail shots to be people who don’t want them or haven’t opted in. This is an important first step. At best, you will create a bad impression with the consumer and maybe labelled a spammer. At worst, you may get in trouble with the law. More importantly, however, you need to realise that, when someone checks their inbox, you have about a 1 second window to get their attention and make them curious enough to open the e-mail instead of clicking Delete. The subject field is crucial. It cannot be bland or formal and or even too promotional – people get bombarded with offers throughout the day (20% extra with this, 10% off that) and eventually their impact dulls. Indeed, the best piece of advice I can give is to be creative with your subject field. Do something a little offbeat and a little left field. Let’s face it: a newsletter doesn’t arrive in an inbox like the declaration of independence. The best reaction you can hope from the recipient is curiosity, which, like in any form of marketing, forms the first stage of the buying process.