This is a very helpful article. Thank you!

What subject line would you recommend for someone pitching the individual in charge of content at a digital marketing agency?

Thanks for sharing an article. The content about Email Subject Lines is really good. Thank you

Is putting "RE: " in front of the subject a good hack? I feel it gets them interested that it's an email they previously replied to and needs another reply.

Hi there! We wouldn't recommend adding "RE:" to the subject line in this case since there will be no historical thread to confirm this and the reader is likely to feel deceived. Honesty is always best!

Very interesting article. Subject lines should be short, simple, concise and straight to the point. Also providing sense of humor, scarcity or fear of missing out (FOMO) would encourage recipients to open their emails even more. The major thing is not to exaggerate and always manage to deliver the promise by aligning the email body with the subject line. I also think that email marketers should pay attention not to use spam trigger words in either the subject line or email body, which would increase the chance for emails to end up in recipients spam folder.

Georges, thanks for reading this post and taking the time to add your input. You've added value with your tips and suggestions— we appreciate it!

My pleasure :)

Excellent. I'm a professional copywriter (25 years) but haven't written email subject lines for a few years -- and that was for a dramatically different product and demographic.Since best practices are always shifting, I really appreciate the info you've provided here. And glad to see the DATE of this article clearly posted. I found what looked like a great NNG article -- no date. Doing the sleuthing to find the info was annoying.

Megan Marrs, this is a great article, where can i get in touch with you for some advise or classes regarding marketing?

Glad you found this helpful! You can access our marketing classes here: https://www.wordstream.com/...

Really good read. Lot of things covered. I think I'll go even shorter than 50 characters. Some scenarios (e.g. Yahoo app on iPad) don't show more than 30 characters.
I really enjoyed your article Megan!

Glad you found this helpful!

Megan, this is a great list. Although I do not use much email marketing, this can really help me when writing my articles to increase my open rates. Thanks a lot.

David

Great tips! I used those tips plus more when I sent over a million emails in one month. When sending that many emails, you need to maximize the value of the subject line.

Below is my raw data, and here is a summary of what I learned:

"What I learned about email subject lines from sending 1,547,413 emails in one month"

https://uploads.disquscdn.c...

We have tested with two email types.
One was text based (More text less images)
Second was with images and with a story
Both have them have gotten ok ok Open rate.
What else we can do to further refine it.

good

We use remail.io for email automation but to actually get a response we need new ideas and this article is very helpful.

Fantastic tips here Megan! I absolutely love the 1 word example.

As long as you have preview text that adds context rather than "View Email in Your Browser" Or have the image pull the alt text it's a perfect way to stand out!

I'd follow you on Twitter if you didn't tweet so much about politics ;)

I love it, it's so useful for me

A lot depends on what time of the day you are sending the email. Usually the emails are opened from less than 1 to a maximum of 12 hours from the time they are sent. Keeping in view the time the email would be probably opened and then syncing your subject line with the date, time and what is a hot topic at that place at the specified time drastically improves the open rate.

I enjoyed reading this so much I'm ashamed to say I was sad when it ended, I wanted more! This was both informative and really amusing, I like your style of writing as well as how clearly it was laid out. Thanks for the information, I'm hoping it will help me in my internship interview tomorrow. As you can probably tell I'm quite nervous as I'm writing comments on random articles that make me laugh at 11.45pm the night before...

yes, all subject lines mentioned we eye catching and can be helpful increasing open rates i can use them according to my niche..thak you for sharing it!

Good post! Out of these 9 Email subject line styles, I personally like the "personalized subject lines.Very effective! Thank you for sharing!

This article will help the internet people for setting up new website or even a blog
from start to end.

This was very helpful. My open rates have improved over the last two years. I will try some of theses hedalines to increase it even more. These were great ideas!

I'm a copy writer and until I learned that the email subject line is such an important hook, I was missing the boat.

You are right on target with this and I will say this for anyone who is serious, always keep learning, it will pay off in the end.

<table style="width: 402pt;" border="0" width="536" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr style="height:105.0pt" height="140"><td class="xl66" style="height:105.0pt;width:402pt" height="140" width="536">Very intriguing and thorough article, Megan :) A lot has been said about subject lines and what works best for them! Amidst that this article throws a lot of light on the various types of subject lines. Funny or informative subject lines tend to get more attention. Lately tweet-able subject lines and using powerful words that conquer open rates have been trending!</td></tr></tbody></table>

What tools to do you recommend to A/B test email subject lines?

Your email marketing software probably provides the capability to split a list into test groups.

<table border="0" width="838" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><colgroup><col width="838"/></colgroup><tbody><tr height="20"><td style="height:15.0pt;width:629pt" height="20" width="838">I pay a quick visit each day some blogs and websites to read posts, however this blog provides quality based posts.</td></tr></tbody></table>

This blog is really nice and informative. Thanks for sharing.

Very informative blog. Email is a part of online marketing. So it should follow a certain criteria like you said the title, title must be compelling and unique to which everybody will atract. Thanks for the great tips. It's very helpful. 

Hi Megan,

I really like the way you have classified subject lines up there. Especially the one word subject line is interesting :) Will definitely try testing it.

Here's an article on how to benchmark Email Open Rates http://hotelmarketingsutra..... Hope you find it useful.

Regards,

Omkar

Thank you for this helpful post! Appreciate it greatly :)

Really helpful information.  This helps me narrow down how to write subject lines that fit my clients.  Thanks.  

<div>I had days looking to develop a solo ad effectively,, this is the most precise and clear</div><div>explanations of all, thank you for sharing it's very helpful to me.</div><div> </div><div>will comment about you on my blog.</div><div> </div><div>10Q Demian :-)</div><div> </div>

Aw, thanks so much for the kind words.

Thank you for the awesome post. I really did enjoy it! Thank you again for your fresh ideas.

Thanks for a terrific overview of best practices!

You are most welcome! <img alt="smiley" height="20" src="http://www.wordstream.com/s..." title="smiley" width="20"/>

Really enjoyed reading your suggestions, very helpful, I find it really difficult to write enticing subjects so this has been a huge help!

So you linked back to the source of the Flikr photo you used, but you can't even mention where that XKCD comic came from or link back to anything but your own article? Then again, I don't know what I'm expecting from someone writing on "wordstream.com". Surely I don't have to explain to you why it's important to link to your sources. If you know anything about marketing at all, which I assume you know at least a *bit*, you understand why it's a slight on the person whose work you're ripping off and featuring with your own. If Randall Munroe were anyone but a fantastic person, he could sue you for image copyright infringement. Do you know what intellectual property means?
 

Woah, reel 'em in cowboy. Obviously since I sourced the Flikr photo I believe in giving credit where it's due. Sometimes captions get lost in the translation and things get overlooked. Thanks to staunch observers like yourself I could never get away with claiming an XKCD article as my own, and I never would. You'll be happy to see I've added a link to the original comic so you can rest easy now.

I agree with you, Megan.

Our email subject line would perhaps be more important than our email content, in most cases. Sometimes, I get tough time in composing subject lines to attract my readers. Thanks for sharing these few different types of effective email subject lines. I'm now free of struggling just to be able to craft my subject line for emails. I found this article really helpful.

Nice post!

Btw, found this post shared on Kingged.com

Glad you found it helpful!

Great tips! Personalized subject lines are an underrated way to entice people to open. Making a list of what to check is good, but there is a great company for helping with all of these tips automatically. It's called Email Opened. They have an automated system that has real-time analysis for subject lines, email body score, send time, and more. Basically anything your unsure of, it will tell you a score as your building your email based on data they have and an industry standard.

I have tried most of the big email marketers out there but find this one to be the easiest to use. It's nice to have something automatically analyze your email as your making it. Worth checking it out!

Hi, Thanks for recommending this automated tool. I will definitely try it for my next campaigns of MailGet.

Keep on working, great job!

Very cool, thanks for letting us know!