PatronManager

In our chapter on e-mail marketing (titled “The Least Exciting but Most Effective Marketing Tool"), we take a moment to focus on e-mail subject lines. Frankly, this topic is so important that we could have written a full chapter on it.

If you’re tracking the success of your e-mails, you know that average open rates for the industry are around 20 percent, and if you’re doing really well, click-through rates are around 3 percent. So if you have 2,000 people on your e-mail list, you can be sure that about 400 are opening that e-mail.

But here’s a fact that many forget: if your subscribers are checking their inbox at all, then 100% of them are seeing your subject line! Subject lines, then, are the most important real estate of the entire e-mail because of their reach.

Your subject line becomes the marketing message. So make sure your subject line communicates the crucial information you want your readers to know. Don't try to be cute, or get bogged down with a clever turn of phrase that only makes sense if someone actually clicks and opens the e-mail, because most won’t.

If you can deliver your key marketing message to the 80 percent of people who are not opening your e-mail, you’ve just dramatically improved the effectiveness of your e-mail marketing.

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