If your business uses email as a marketing tactic, you’re no doubt familiar with the struggle for crafting ‘perfect’ email marketing subject lines.
It’s pretty easy to pick a subject line if you’re sending a direct email from your own web or desktop client like Gmail or Outlook. Any old subject line will do, really. The biggest struggle perhaps is ensuring the subject line accurately conveys the content of your e-mail.
Email marketing is an entirely different beast.
Not only do you need to ensure your subject line is relevant to the content, but before you settle on that perfect text, other factors needing to be considered are:
- deliverability to your database contact list by your e-marketing service provider;
- getting past recipient firewalls and spam filters (and avoiding in Gmail’s “Promotions Tab”);
- catching the attention of recipients within micro-seconds; and most importantly,
- enticing recipients enough to make them actually read your email before hitting the dreaded delete key.
And, like everything in marketing, the ‘rules’ are constantly evolving. Late last year the Washington Post reported a study stating that ending text messages with a period is terrible, and posted another article this month telling texters to Stop. Using. Periods. Period. Which no doubt spurred the lively debate going on with marketers now about how — and even whether or not — to use punctuation in email marketing subject lines.
Since every little piece of information helps, here’s an in-depth article by Smart Insights discussing the statistics of punctuation in e-marketing subject lines: ., ? and ! – Does punctuation in the subject line help or hurt email performance?
There are a lot of tricks of the trade that marketers use to assist with analyzing subject lines based on the above factors. A great place to start is using your e-marketing service provider’s tools for analyzing subject lines.
Here’s another trade resource: Touchstone’s online Subject Line Test tool.
Remember though, regardless of what any tool results show, A/B testing (or even just trial and error) will inform best practices based on your own individual database and e-marketing platform. What works for one company’s database list, may not work for another with different database demographics.
For example: If your database contains primarily millennials who text more than they call people and typically view most emails via smartphones, then you’ll likely want to use less (or no) punctuation in your subject lines. If your database list demographics are comprised of primarily seniors, reading email on desktops, who grew up adhering to formal grammatical guidelines, a lack of punctuation may make your business seem uneducated or uncaring.
Everything about marketing — including email marketing subject lines — comes down to your own unique business and target markets.
…Target markets!
…Target markets
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