The most important part of an email is of course the content. Without compelling content, your email will be for naught. But how do you get subscribers to open your emails in the first place? Here are a few key aspects of the title that play an important role according to a recent study*:

Subject Lines Character Length

Subject lines that were between 61-70 characters had the highest open rates, and were opened twice as often than those with over 100 characters. According to the study however, the most common length for email titles ranged between 41 and 50 characters.

Mobile vs Not

It’s important to know your audience. According to the study, emails read on desktops typically show about 60 characters in the title, as opposed to the 25-30 characters that mobile devices show. Because of this large discrepancy, it would be a good strategy to make sure your most important information or call to action comes first.

Buzzwords

Buzzwords can catch the reader’s attention, but sometimes it may have the opposite effect of what we want. In this study, buzzwords in an email title such as “cheapest” and “quickest” had far fewer open rates than average. On the other hand, email with the words “fastest” and, interestingly enough, “prettiest” had relatively high open rates.

Clickbait Phrases

As opposed to some popular buzzwords that showed encouraging open rates, clickbait terms performed poorly across the board. Phrases such as “secret of” and “won’t believe” performed particularly badly, and indicating that these should be avoided.

Call to Action Phrases

Call to action phrases are those that tell the readers what to do. They include words such as “add”, “click”, and “download”. Overall, these terms performed much better than their clickbait counterparts, with the words “open” and “register” having the best results.

Pronouns

It’s interesting that the study found any significance to pronouns, but the data never lies. According to the numbers, no pronoun other than “you” had a positive effect on read rates.

Urgency

Subject lines with words and phrases that created a sense of urgency performed the best as a category. By making customers feel as though they had little time to act on a promotion, businesses were able to garner much higher than average open rate. Phrases like “still time” and “limited time” offers were especially strong performers.

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While these findings may provide some sort of insight into what words you should be including in your email titles, it’s important to note that your cases may be different from what they observed. Ultimately, testing and recording data from your own campaigns will be the best way to see what works and what doesn’t for your specific audience. Fortunately, Trumpia automatically creates reports for you with up to the minute accuracy on all your campaigns, so you can make sure your emails give you the most impact possible.

*(2015, May 5). MarketingCharts staff, Email Subject Lines: The Latest Data. Retrieved from http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/email-subject-lines-the-latest-data-54088/