The Official Best and Worst Words to Use in Your Email Subject Lines.
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Hurry! Click to Open!
Don’t Miss Out!
Please Open Me! Pleeeease!
I’m sure you’ll have come across plenty of Emails in your own inbox which already reek of desperation before you’ve even clicked on them to see what further horrors await inside the main content.
In fact, unless you’re feeling particularly bored or downright reckless, you probably won’t even bother taking that extra step to open up the email.
A badly-worded subject line is far more likely to get your trigger finger pointing straight at the Trash Bin.
But how much thought and consideration do you give to the Subject Lines of your own Business Marketing Emails?
You may have just invested a huge amount of time and brainpower in perfecting the content of your latest mind-blowing email.
But it could be at serious risk of getting completely ignored by the majority of your recipients if it was let down by a poor and hastily-composed Subject Line.
I do wonder how many sensational emails have sadly remained largely unread – just because they were given a dreadful Subject Line which they truly didn’t deserve…
Those crucial few words that pop up on the Inbox screens of your recipients are perhaps the most important words of all to get right.
A poor choice of Subject Line can result in your emails getting dismissed without even getting opened.
There’s very little point in composing amazing content for the inside of your email if you’re only going to slap on a lousy Subject Line to represent the outside of your email.
Let’s take a look at some of the Best and Worst Words you can possibly use in a Subject Line, along with some quick tips and pointers on Creating Killer Subject Lines for Your Marketing Emails…
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The Best and the Worst!
A recent study from Alchemy Worx analysed the data from a whopping 21 billion emails despatched by 2,500 Brands.
The study painstakingly examined the Email Subject Lines to determine each and every word’s potential influence on the Email open rates.
I bet that was a long night for those poor researchers…
So, which words were the most powerful and which ones were considered to be the least effective?
Well, I’ve cheekily used the most successful word of all in the headline of this very Blog article.
If you’re still reading, we can safely assume that there may be some truth and sound logic in all of this!
Here are the Top 5 Strongest Words;
1) Upgrade
2) Just
3) Content
4) Go
5) Wonderful
And here are the 5 Weakest Words;
1) Miss
2) Deals
3) Groovy
4) Conditions
5) Friday
Email Subject Lines which included words from the weakest list tended to decrease the average email open rate by around 4%.
However, the top 5 performers on the strongest list all generated significantly more successful results.
All the words from this top-scoring list were more likely to increase the average open rate by well over 50% when used in an Email Subject Line.
In fact, the most successful word of all – Upgrade – actually increased the average open rate by a mighty 65%.
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The report from Alchemy Worx also broke down the best and worst Subject Line words by specific industries.
For example, the Best Performing Words for the Media and Entertainment industry were Content, Important, Expired, Information and Renew.
The Least Effective Words in this industry were Monday, Furry, Grade, Nite and Double.
The Best Performing Words for Retailers were Painting, Ships, Please, Notice, and Recipe.
The Least Effective Words included Groovy, Friday, Fifty, and Volunteer.
Meanwhile, the Strongest Words for the Technology industry were Upgrade, Just, Go, Better, and Deserve.
The Least Effective Words were Miss, Deals, Out, Year and Learn.
Using Symbols in your Email Subject Lines tend to generate rather mixed results, and I would say are generally best avoided.
Whilst a happy little snowman symbol was found to increase email open rates during the Xmas period, the vast majority of other symbols did not have a positive effect, with some symbols decreasing average open rates by as much as 9%.
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So, what we can learn from these findings?
Well, there are naturally some surprising and quite bizarre words popping up in those lists, and we have to remember that there are all kinds of variables at work here which will have affected the results.
But a general pattern emerging from the data seems to suggest that genuinely useful, interesting and informative words tend to pull in the most powerful open rates.
Cliched, sales-y, and boring words are more likely to reduce your chances of getting read by your recipients.
Oh, and it appears that nobody really likes the word groovy anymore.
Shame.
Creating a Killer Subject Line
So, what pointers do we need to carefully consider when crafting our own Email Subject Lines and ensuring that our content actually gets digested?
Here are the four quick tips to bear in mind;
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Be Intriguing…
Dry subject lines can instantly turn off your audience.
If you’ve bored the reader with your initial headline, you’re unlikely to entice them into exploring any further.
Try to think more creatively about what might intrigue you into opening up a marketing email.
Be witty, surprising, quirky, unusual, or promise something that you can genuinely deliver.
Promising something that you don’t deliver will only end in ultimate disappointment.
Such a misleading tactic may get one email opened up, but it may get all your future marketing emails consigned to the Junk Folder!
…but Stick to the Point!
It can be a tricky balancing act to appear intriguing and unusual whilst sticking to a serious point!
However, you do need to bear in mind that your readers need to have at least a rough idea of what your email will contain before they open it up.
Going overboard with the intrigue and forgetting to state the point could result in some of your target audience missing out on something which may have genuinely interested them.
Short and Snappy
Remember that tricky balancing act? It’s going to get even trickier.
Your Email Subject Line should be as concise as possible – ideally less than 40 characters in length.
Longer subject lines can get chopped off from some inbox screens, which will obviously damage the impact and credibility of your killer headline!
Split-Test for Success
If the thought of creating a Subject Line which is intriguing and states a point and sticks to a strict character limit is already beginning to sound a little bit impossible, you could always consider the option of split-testing your next marketing email.
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It could be the case that your specific target audience responds particularly well to a certain breed of Subject Line.
Perhaps your own winning formula falls outside of the general rules of thumb, and your target audience is more likely to open an email with a dryly informative subject line, or even a wildly outlandish subject line with no hint of a clue as to the actual content inside!
The only way to be sure is to send different versions of your email to your mailing list and closely monitor the results.
In this case, you would be sending out the same email content to everyone, but simply split-testing different versions of the Subject Line.
(Avoid split-testing your email campaigns in too many different ways at once, as it may be difficult to determine exactly which elements were successful and which elements failed!)
So, how much thought and time do you spend on crafting an Email Subject Line?
Do you have your own selection of top-performing words or clichéd words to be avoided at all costs?
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