The average employee receives more than 100 emails a day. Naturally, not all of them get read. How could they be? Fully reading and processing that many emails could take a whole work day. I commit about an hour to just reading email every day, and yet in just the last year I’ve chosen not to open 8,652 emails, consisting of newsletters, sales offers, discount offers, and lead nurturing emails. The only two pieces of information I read before deciding whether to open one, are the subject line and the sender.
Recommended reading: A quick guide to email marketing
35% of email recipients open an email and 69% mark one as spam based on the subject line alone. When a single line can be so powerful, it’s worth meditating over it to make it zing for your readers.
Whether you want to reach out to a prospect for the first time or request a customer referral after deal closure, use these email templates to grab attention and get replies.
Here are a few best practices that help you get your email opened:
Keep it short
Your email recipients sift through a sea of subject lines every time they open their inbox. Brevity is the key to grabbing their attention. A recent email census report shows that emails with four to 15 character subject lines have the highest open rates. Also, remember that people open emails on different devices like mobile phone, ipad, tablet, and laptop, which support variable character length. Keeping the character count less than 50 helps keep readers engaged.
Personalize it
“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language”, is one of Dale Carnegie’s tips for influencing people. A recent study by Marketingsherpa shows that adding a name in the subject line can boost email open rates by 29.3%. Include person’s first name or city to improve open rates. Vtiger lets you add merge tags in subject line to personalize the subject line with content that is unique to your subscribers.
Make it descriptive
Try using email subject lines that have attention grabbing words like “Urgent”, “Breaking”, “Important”, and “Alert” – they tend to have higher open rates. Avoid spam trigger words like “Free”, “Help”, “% off”. Adestra found an 18.7% fall off in clicks when the word “newsletter” was in the subject line.
Vtiger lets you design, build, target, and send engaging email campaigns free with many editions of Vtiger. Once sent, you can track every email open and click, and generate reports to review results and optimize future messaging strategies. Have any questions? Send us an email at [email protected]
