How to Write the Perfect Email Subject Line | Ep. 32

Ty Smith0:04

Welcome to another episode of the Crypto Marketing Show. I am Ty Daniel Smith.

Kylie Low0:06

And I'm Kylie Low.

Ty Smith0:07

Today we are discussing tips to write an email subject line that drives open rates and converts. So we will walk through why email marketing is important, why the subject line is one of the most important pieces for driving results, and we'll discuss some research-proven tips to keep in mind when writing the next subject line for your next marketing email.

Ty Smith0:20

So first, let's go into why, quickly, why email marketing is so important. So the biggest reason email marketing is so important is it's one of the highest ROI online marketing channels available. So Neil Patel, if you're not aware of him, he's kind of a huge marketing person, his team put together a graphic last year comparing the revenue generated from each dollar spent on different marketing channels.

Ty Smith1:02

So according to that graphic, for every dollar spent on banner ads, companies generated $2 in revenue. For every dollar spent on Google search ads, they generated $17 in revenue. For every dollar spent on SEO, they generated $22.24 in revenue. And on email marketing, for every dollar spent on email marketing, they generated $40 in revenue.

Kylie Low1:15

So almost twice as much as SEO.

Ty Smith1:17

Yeah, and SEO already is a really effective way of spending your budget. Yeah, so the reasons for that are, one, that it's very inexpensive to send emails. An email hosting provider can cost as little as like $10 a month.

Ty Smith1:28

And also, everyone checks their email. Everyone has an email address. According to a study from Fluent, which is a New York-based marketing data company, 89% of Americans check their inbox at least once a day. So if you're sending an email, it's going to be seen. It might not be opened if you don't have a great subject line, but it will be seen.

Ty Smith2:04

So let's discuss why it's important to focus on your email subject line. The biggest reason is pretty obvious. It's the first thing people see. When you open your email, the first thing you'll see is the subject line. So if it's not something that compels people to open it, then you're kind of wasting your time.

Kylie Low2:18

Right. And experts say putting no subject line is a huge mistake and most likely your email won't be opened. So it's really important to put a subject line and a good subject line.

Ty Smith2:24

Yeah, exactly. I wouldn't even consider sending no, I guess if it was to someone that I personally know and they're expecting it, but other than that, for a marketing email, I definitely wouldn't do that.

Ty Smith2:30

So let's discuss tips to write a subject line that improves open and click-through rates. So the first one is don't capitalize. This is kind of something that might seem a little weird to some people because by default, a lot of people will capitalize the first letter of every word in an email subject line, kind of like you would for a blog article or something like that. But studies show that actually is not the way to go. So AWeber, which is a big email marketing service provider, a software company, says that subject lines that have all lowercase letters are opened 35% more than emails with capitalized letters at the first word.

Kylie Low3:19

Huh, that's interesting.

Ty Smith3:20

Yeah, it's kind of curious.

Ty Smith3:23

Yeah, another tip is to keep it short. So this is another research-backed finding. It was found that emails that have less than 30 characters have a significantly higher open rate than longer subject lines.

Kylie Low3:29

And do you know why that is?

Ty Smith3:30

I don't. I could only guess.

Kylie Low3:32

It's because the typical subject line on a mobile phone is 25 to 30 characters, and 77% of emails are opened on a mobile device. So if you can read the whole subject line on your phone, you're probably going to open it, right?

Ty Smith4:07

Wow, I'm kicking myself for not knowing that. Huh.

Kylie Low4:09

Yeah, I think that was a HubSpot finding.

Ty Smith4:14

Yeah, I think that sounds familiar now. Yeah, so just remove unnecessary details from the subject line. Also, remove things like newsletter, like the words 'newsletter' and 'update'. It just kind of gives the impression that if the person misses the email, it's part of a series and they'll just catch the information in the next one. It kind of makes it seem like the content is not that important. That's just something we've picked up along the way.

Ty Smith4:27

Next tip is to make it personal. So people want to do business with people, not large companies. So if you give them the impression that an email is being sent to a mass list and it's not necessarily geared to them, they're going to be way less interested in the content than if it seems like it's specific to them.

Kylie Low5:01

So spammy.

Ty Smith5:02

Yeah, it seems, not necessarily spammy because sometimes the information is important. It's just, I don't know, I got a lot of stuff to do in a day. If an email isn't specific to me, then it's probably not that important. That's kind of my thinking. I'm sure people think like that.

Ty Smith5:10

So some ways to do that: send from a person, not an inbox. So like, for example, for us, our team inbox is info@coinbound.io. I wouldn't send marketing emails from that because it seems like it's not coming from a person. So I would send the marketing email from ty@coinbound.io, and that's what we do because a lot of the stuff that we send, it is personal and it should be personal.

Ty Smith5:23

Also, if you're using an email service provider, you can use personalization tokens. If you don't know what that means, a personalization token is like a little line of text that you can add when writing an email through something like HubSpot or Mailchimp, and it's going to take information from the recipient and dynamically populate that in the email. So rather than just writing like 'Hello' in the beginning of your email, you can write 'Hello [First Name]' and then it's going to say 'Hello John' or whatever the recipient's name is. That goes a long way in making it seem genuine and specific to that person.

Ty Smith6:11

Next one, kind of along the same lines, is to tailor the message to them, not to you. So in general, I believe, and more marketing agencies are starting to see that marketing in general is more about providing value and not just taking it, and your subject line should reflect the same kind of ethos.

Kylie Low6:24

Very true.

Ty Smith6:24

Yeah, so rather than write subject lines like, 'Check out our new features' or whatever, write something like, 'Grow your Twitter following in 30 days'. It should give a little bit of information about what the value is that the recipient is going to receive from it, not necessarily something that you're promoting because people don't want to be advertised to in general.

Kylie Low7:02

Yeah, true.

Ty Smith7:02

So, I mean, it's important to understand that everyone's audience is a little bit different. A B2C company is going to probably find different things to work than a B2B company. If you're not sure what's going to work best for your audience, you should just A/B test it. Most email hosting providers nowadays have that feature, if not, you'll buy like the premium version and it's not that much more expensive.

Ty Smith7:17

And the way that will work is you'll write two versions of the email, 25% of your list will get one version, 25% will get the second version, and then it's going to calculate which has a higher open rate, and then it's going to send the remaining 50% the higher-performing subject line. So you do that a couple of times and you can kind of pick up on some patterns of what's working for your company, and then it will save you some time and then you can continue to do that and keep optimizing.

Ty Smith8:04

Some options that do that just off the top of my head: HubSpot, Mailchimp, Constant Contact. I'm sure most nowadays are capable of that, but those are just some that I know do have that capability. I think that is going to wrap it up. If you have any questions about how to optimize your email subject line, just shoot us an email, info@coinbound.io. We'll lend a second pair of eyes. And if you found this episode valuable, please remember to rate and review us on Apple. It goes a long way in helping us produce more content and continue talking about interesting stuff like this. That is all for today, guys. Thank you for joining us. We'll catch you next time.