Emailing: How to succeed in your subject?

In email marketing, crafting a compelling subject line is crucial, as it's your primary tool for encouraging recipients to open your message. That's precisely why your subject line must be written meticulously and carefully. You need to both pique your readers' interest and reassure them of your expertise regarding the topic addressed in your email. However, be aware that there are constraints when writing your subject line if you want optimal performance, as the word count is extremely limited. This is where your biggest challenge lies: you must be concise and keep things simple.

Enjoy your reading.

Here is the summary of our dossier dedicated to the object: 

1. The subject line is crucial for your email
2. Structure is important for your object
3. Be careful not to fall into the spam folder
4. Here are some examples of objects,
5. Run some tests.

Why is the subject line important in direct mail?

To succeed with your email campaign or newsletter , you need to craft a subject line that entices your readers to open your email. In fact, it's primarily your subject line that contributes to improving your open rate . However, before going into more detail, you should know that internet users spend approximately fifteen seconds reading an email. This means you must be concise and get straight to the point, or risk being ignored.

Make your readers want to read your message 

To begin this guide, you should know that the subject line is crucial for the success of your email campaign. You need to entice your readers to open the message you just sent them once it arrives in their inbox. Otherwise, all your design and writing efforts will be wasted. And to encourage them to read your message, the subject line is essential, as it's the first thing your recipients will see when they receive your email. 

Improve your open rate

To determine if your campaign is a success, the best way is to analyze your statistics. Regarding your email subject line, the main indicator to monitor is the open rate. The purpose of this open rate is to determine whether you succeeded in enticing your readers to read the message. Naturally, this depends primarily on crafting a compelling subject line. To calculate the open rate, divide the number of times your email was opened by your recipients by the number of emails sent. Then, multiply the result by 100 to obtain a percentage. 

Configure your sender address 

However, to improve your open rate, you also need to properly configure your sender address. The sender address is simply the email address that appears in your recipients' inboxes, right next to your subject line. Configuring this address is quite simple, as it's easily customizable in most modern email software.

Here's how to configure your sender address in the Brevo email software.

How to structure your email subject line?

To maximize your chances of crafting a near-perfect subject line for each of your campaigns, we recommend following a two-part structure: first, announce the topic, then pose a question to your readers. Next, be mindful of the subject line's length. If it's too long, it won't fully appear in your readers' inboxes, which is very detrimental to your campaign.

A two-part structure

To ensure the success of your project, here is the structure we recommend you use. This structure consists of two complementary parts: 

1. First, state the topic of your email. Simply write it down in a few words. Remember, your subject line shouldn't be too long.
2. Next, we advise you to ask a question. This question must be relevant to your readers. This means you need to demonstrate empathy in order to find a question that is both interesting to your online audience and one that you can answer with your products or services.

Be careful not to make it too long

For your subject line to be truly successful, it obviously needs to be fully readable by your target audience. However, keep in mind that the maximum number of characters displayed depends on the email client your recipients use. That's why we've compiled the maximum character limits for the most commonly used email clients. Here they are: 

• Gmail: 77 characters,
• Outlook: 60 characters,
• LaPoste: 45 characters,
• Yahoo: 77 characters,
• Orange: 30 characters.

Overall, the maximum number of characters is around fifty. Therefore, we advise you to write an object that does not exceed 50 characters to ensure it is perfectly readable.

Beware of spam

What could be more frustrating for a communications professional than sending an email campaign to all recipients only to find that the message has been systematically filtered into the spam folder? It is precisely to avoid ending up in spam that we draw your attention to special characters, words, and even emoticons that should absolutely not be included in your subject lines.

Words to ban

To avoid ending up in spam folders, you should avoid several types of words in your subject line:

• Money-specific words such as promotion, free, refunded, gift, reward, coupon, special offer, etc.
• Words that lead to suspicious behavior include: well done, you won, reward, just for you, exceptional gift, etc.
• Words requiring urgency: now, limited time, hurry, urgent, etc.
• Words related to money: cash, liquid, easy money, benefit, gain, profit, income, etc.

You can find an exhaustive list of words to ban, also known as spam words, in this article created by Plezi: spam words .

Smileys to avoid

First, you should understand that it's perfectly acceptable to include a smiley face in your subject line; it won't negatively impact your email campaign. However, overusing smiley faces is a known practice that's meticulously monitored by email inboxes and almost always results in your email being flagged as spam. That's why you need to be careful and avoid using too many smiley faces. Specifically, we recommend limiting your subject line to no more than two smiley faces, or you'll likely end up in the spam folder.

READ ALSO: 9 tips to prevent your emails from ending up in spam

Examples of objects

To help you practically, we have selected several examples of objects that will allow you to easily understand the structure we advise you to adopt.

Examples to follow

• Email marketing: How to create a successful subject line?
• Newsletter: How to write a good subject line?
• Email: What does a good email address look like?
• Email subject line: a lever to increase your open rate.

Test your objects

When writing your subject line, it's crucial to know which type best suits your recipients. But how do you know? This is where testing becomes essential, as it allows you to determine the most effective subject line for your target audience. The primary method is to conduct tests and then measure the results. This will enable you to identify the subject line structure that works best for your specific context.

Send multiple campaigns

The first step in running tests is to use different structures or wording in your subject lines across multiple email campaigns. This means that for each campaign, you'll use a unique type of subject line. You have several options for varying your subject lines. For example:

• Adapt your structure to each campaign: ask a question or not, announce the theme or not, find other structural ideas, etc
• Vary the wording of your questions,
• Modify the wording of the first part of your subject line to reflect your theme announcement
• You can also subscribe to your competitors' newsletters to find ideas for different wording. However, be careful not to include your work email address, as this will let your competitors know you're interested in their newsletter.
• If you're stuck for inspiration, you can also use software to write your object descriptions. ActiveCampaign, for example, offers a free object description generator . Essentially, you write the topic, and then the software suggests several objects you can use.
• Etc.

Analyze your statistics

Once you've sent several email campaigns and tested different subject lines, you need to analyze your performance. This will help you determine which type of subject line best meets your readers' needs. As mentioned in a previous paragraph, the key metric for evaluating your subject line is the open rate. As a reminder, the open rate is calculated as follows: divide the number of times your email was opened by the number of emails sent. Then, simply find the highest open rate across all your campaigns. Logically, you can then deduce that this is the type of subject line you should reuse to meet your readers' needs. However, we want to emphasize that your readers' needs and expectations may change over time. Therefore, even if you've found a subject line wording or structure that seems to work for you, we recommend regularly testing different subject lines and continuing to measure your performance. In our opinion, testing once a year is sufficient.

Conclusion

In conclusion, here is the essential information to remember if you want to create the perfect subject line for your email campaigns :

1. The subject line is crucial, as it's your primary way of encouraging recipients to read your message. That's why you should write it carefully and dedicate some time to it. It's a key factor in the success of your email campaign and can significantly increase your open rate.
2. The structure of your subject line is essential. Its purpose is to simplify understanding as much as possible regarding the topic you're addressing in your email campaign. To achieve this, and to ensure your readers fully grasp what you're talking about, we recommend using an effective structure divided into two parts. In the first part, you'll briefly announce the topic you're discussing. Then, in the second part, you'll ask a relevant question for your audience.
3. To be thorough when writing subject lines, we feel it's important to be mindful of spam. First, be aware that certain types of content in your subject line will more easily lead to your emails being flagged as spam by your readers. Specifically, we advise against using any emoticons and avoid certain words such as "free," "offered," "gift," etc.
4. To help you create a successful subject line, we've provided several examples that you can adapt for your own campaigns. Of course, you can use our examples as inspiration. However, you can also use software to generate email subject lines. Most of the time, this software is free and very easy to use. You simply specify the topic you're addressing, and the software does all the work. It will offer you several subject lines; all you have to do is choose.
5. Our final piece of advice is to run subject line tests to find the formula that works for you and your readers. To do this, we recommend varying the structure of your subject lines and experimenting with different wording. Of course, you should track your statistics for each campaign, especially the open rate. When this metric is at its highest, you can be confident that you've found the right subject line. 

To provide you with high-quality content , we enlisted the help of an email marketing expert. We turned to Mathieu, founder and editor of the Blog du Digital , who wrote this guide.

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