Perfect Email Subject Lines in 6 Easy Steps [Infographic]

Email is such a crutial part of your inbound marketing toolbox. But the key to a great email is a perfect subject line. Your email subject line is what determines if your email gets opened or trashed. So follow the information in this infographic from Litmus and boost your email open rate today! 

Use these six easy steps for email subject lines that get higher open rates.

Getting the Open

Here's a quick rundown of the six steps - you'll get all the details in the infographic itself. 

Step 1 - Useful & Ultra-Specific. Be relevant, and clear about the value to your reader

Step 2 - Identify Yourself. Make sure that your "From Name" in your email is something that your readers will recognize and care about.

Step 3 - Be Visually Different. Using brackets, capitalization, quotation marks, etc. breaks up the text in your subject lines and makes you stand out. 

Step 4 - Use Timely Topics & Urgency. Using topics that are current in the news and showing scarcity in your subject lines is great for relevance. 

Step 5 - Call To Action. Never be afraid to tell your reader what you want them to do. If you're including a link to a video say "Watch this Video"

Step 6 - Test It Out. Your audience is going to determine the success of your emails. These days tools like A/B testing in emails is HUGE. Try two subject lines on a small segment of your list then use the winner on the rest.  

The biggest take away I hope you get is Step #6: Test. I remember when I started doing some email marketing and I really had to test. I had some formulas for email subject lines I wanted to try so I changed the subject lines on the auto-repsonders. The end result wasn't great; the open rates dropped. A lot.

I was livid.

So what did I do?

Glad you asked.

I went back to the start. I wrote a bunch of emails and used my subject line formulas and then tried some really conversational subject lines. Oh, the email subject lines were from an amazing copywriter I was learning from so they were good. I then sent out those emails to 40% of the list but split tested subject line styles.

The conversational subject lines killed it! I was getting a 90% open rate... 

Moral of the story is this: The golden rule in marketing is Test, Test, Test. 

Let me know what your biggest takaway from this post was in the comments below. Do you think it is something you will try? If you do, let me know what kind of results you get!