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Every Tuesday, the Volusion team will be posting quick educational videos to help you further succeed online. Today’s episode demonstrates how to create email subject lines that will boost the open rate of any email marketing campaign.

Hello and happy Tuesday! Can you believe it’s already mid-September? For all you seasoned ecommerce gurus out there, you know this time of year means holiday prep time. One of the most powerful weapons in your holiday marketing arsenal comes from your newsletters and email campaigns. This presents an opportunity for you to deliver your discounts, special offers and company news directly into the inbox of your most loyal customers. And to make your mouth water even more, a whopping 93% of online shoppers subscribe to company newsletters to receive this type of information. Talk about a gold mine!

That’s why today’s Two Minute Tuesday covers a very important aspect of getting your subscribers to your message: effective email subject lines. Take a look at this quick video to learn more and send your open rates through the roof.

Let us know your other tips/tricks/questions/suggestions on email subject lines in the comment box below.

Happy selling!
-Matt Winn, Online Communications Specialist, Volusion

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Hi everybody! My name is Matt and I’m an Online Communications Specialist here at Volusion. Welcome to Two Minute Tuesdays, where we give you two minutes of ecommerce advice to bolster your online success. Today we’re going to cover an important topic in regards to your email campaigns, and that’s how to write effective email subject lines.

Far too many small business owners, and even large business owners quite frankly, spend too much time working on their content and great email design, only to have their subject line as an afterthought. Your email subject line is your only chance to get people to want to open your email, so pay special attention to get your open rate up.

First, you’ll want your subject line to preview the content of your email. If you’re going to have a promotion, have full disclosure in your subject line, like “40% off.” If you have something that is more informational, like a newsletter, simply state that the email is a newsletter. You want your subject line to tell people what’s inside, and the email content to sell what you’re trying to sell.

Now with that in mind, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t sound like a used car salesman. Just think of the amount of spam messages you get in your inbox and the number of times you hit the “spam” button in your email client. Same thing happens to all your customers. While you may think that your message is important, your customers are trying to filter out what’s not important to them. So if you have subjects that are in all caps, it’s really annoying and people aren’t going to open it. Thus, make sure your subject line is valuable. Think, “What’s in it for me?” from the perspective of your customers.

Next, a smaller tip that is pretty important. You want to keep your subject lines between 35-50 characters in length. There are several email clients out there, like Gmail, Yahoo!, Outlook, etc., but ultimately, you can ensure that your subject line is viewable in any inbox if it stays between 35-50 characters. If customers can see it all, they’ll be more likely to open.

Next, consider your list. This is a bit more segmentation. If you’re sending an email to your current customer list, you can be a bit more creative with your subject lines since they’re expecting to hear from you. If you’re sending something to a list that isn’t expecting to hear from you, such as a list of people who have come to your site but never purchased, you can be a bit more aggressive with your subject line to show the benefit of what’s inside and encourage people to open the message.

Now with everything we’ve gone over so far, the ultimate thing you want to take away is to test, test, test your subject line. And when you’re done testing, test them again, and test them some more. You’ll be able to see that your subject line truly affects your open rate, so that’s a key metric to look at. You can also see how your subject line is affecting your click-through rate. Ultimately you can do an A/B test to see which subject line performs best, and send the better performer as the bigger blast.

Email marketing can be really fun, but it can also be fairly complex. But your subject line is the common thread that brings everything together. If you have any questions about email marketing, let us know, we’re happy to help.

From me to you, happy selling!