The Small But Mighty Marketing Show – Episode 02

How To Writer Better Email Subject Lines With These 4 Different Styles

Are you unwittingly shooting your email marketing in the foot, by treating the email subject line like the poor relation?

I know it’s tempting, believe me.

You’ve downed 2 large mugs of tea labouring lovingly over the BEST email body copy you can muster.

You’ve done a segue to the selling section worthy of at least two chocolate bourbons to go with the tea…

You’ve ticked almost everything on your ‘Efficacious Email Marketing’ checklist.

And as the finish line comes into sight there’s just ONE thing left to do before you load that baby into your email blaster.

But…hold that fist-pump buddy….it ain’t over ‘til the fat lady produces a click-worthy Email Subject Line (or you do, if the fat lady’s busy singing.)

And this is where you’ll end up in one of two camps:

The camp that bows down to the majesty of an email subject done well, and gives it the respect and time it deserves

OR

The camp that slaps a couple of words together like a shoddy game of sticklebricks, cos’ it’s time to hustle on to the next task

Which would you rather be?

The former of course, yes?!

In  this episode of The Small But Mighty Marketing Show below I’m digging into:

• What the most important purpose of your email subject line is
• Who your email subject line should speak to
• How to mix up your subject line styles to connect and tap into the different emotional states of your audience
• Plus 4 handy-dandy examples of different styles you can model for your own emails.

Don’t underestimate this small but important part of your email – it’s the foundation on which the rest of your email sits, so your want to be putting your best foot forward, not shooting yourself in said foot!

Feel free to hit the ‘Share’ arrow on the video if you’ve found it useful.

And if the whole topic of email subject lines is leaving you perplexed, or you know yours could be getting better results (ya know…more opens, more buy-in, more sales) and you’d like my help, get in touch. Good tea, chocolate bourbons, and better results from your marketing endeavours are yours for the taking!

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Here’s the transcript of the video of you’re a reader rather than a watcher…

Hi, it’s Tanya Smith-Lorenz from morebusinessbuzz.com, and in today’s Small but Mighty marketing show I want to talk to you about email subject lines. So, we’re all sending emails as business owners, or we all should be if you have an audience that you have on your email list.

So, why are email subject lines important, and what is their main purpose? So, let’s look at that first. The main purpose of an email subject line is to get your email opened by the recipient. That’s it, that’s the single main purpose of your email subject line. So, as you can see, they actually really matter, because if people don’t even open your emails, then what’s the point of your email marketing?

So, you need to actually give some time to what you’re using for your subject lines. Give it some thought, don’t just do it as the last part of the email as a throwaway thing. Give it some thought, because that’s what’s going to get your emails actually opened by the reader to keep that communication and dialogue going between you and them.

So, a couple of tips, and firstly always write to one reader, because even though you may have 100 people on your list, or 1,000 people on your list, it’s only ever one person who’s receiving your email. And they’re sitting in their office, or scrolling through their phone, whatever. It’s one person receiving your email, so write to one person always. Not, “Hey everybody,” or in the plural, it just doesn’t make sense to the recipient, and it creates disconnect.

I’m going to go through four of the main styles of subject lines that you can use, and give you a couple of examples. And you can use these to mix and match during your email marketing.

The first example of an email subject line type would be curiosity.

An example of that would be, “Are you making this email marketing mistake?”

So, when someone receives an email in that style, you’re piquing their curiosity, they want to open the email to find out the answer. Oh, am I making this mistake? I’d better open the email and see whether I am or not.

One thing you need to be really careful with using curiosity based email subject lines is that you do actually deliver in the email the answer to which you’re asking the question or piquing the curiosity about in the subject line. If you’re just using clickbait style curiosity in your subject lines, you may get your emails opened the first couple of times, but if you’re not actually delivering any useful, relevant content related to it in your email, people are going to get annoyed pretty quickly and they’ll just tune out your emails and stop opening them. So, curiosity is a great one to use, you’ll see it being used by a lot of marketers. But use it wisely, and use it well.

The second style is the benefit type of subject line.

This is a very direct subject line. There’s no mystery within this.

So, it could be something like, “How to get more emails opened.” Or, “Steal this email template.”

It is what it says on the tin. You’re saying in the subject quite clearly what someone is going to get the answer to in the email. So there’s no mystery or curiosity with it, it’s direct, and you’re actually showing them the benefit that they’re going to get when they open your email, which obviously is great.

The third style of email is tapping into urgency and scarcity.

You’ll see these being used a lot when people are running promotional sequences, that type of email. So, if for example you’re running an offer, and the offer is closing tomorrow, then you can leverage urgency and scarcity in your email subject line.

You might say something like, “Last change to grab your email template today.”

Again, it is fairly direct. You’re telling people that time is running out, but you’re tapping into that FOMO, fear of missing out. People don’t want to miss out, you’re using urgency and scarcity to get people of the fence, to open the email and to take action.

The final of the four email types that I wanted to talk about today is the proof and results email.

If you have good proof and good results from what you do, or what you share, then these can be really powerful emails. So you might want to create things like case studies, or show people testimonials.

An example of that could be, “[Case study] 23% ROI from this one email.”

So, people know that when they open that email, based on that subject line, you’re going to be giving them a case study showing them how well your methodology worked.

Obviously you would change that to suit your own case studies and your own market, but again, if you’ve got good proof and good results, good testimonials, then use them, and frame them in the email subject line so that people know that they’re seeing the proof that you’ve got.

So, that’s just a quick summary today of how to pay more attention to your email subject lines, what their sole purpose is, and four different ways of mixing and matching different styles of email subject lines in your email marketing so that it doesn’t feel stale, and it keeps your audience intrigued and entertained, and connected to you, and building that all important relationship.

If you’ve enjoyed this video and found it useful, then feel free to share it with anyone you think it would help. And come on over to morebusinessbuzz.com for more tips and strategies to help you with your email marketing and your copywriting. Okay, bye bye.