{3:45 minutes to read} People check more email more times a day more than any other social media combined. We all know this is true – anecdotally and personally – which is what makes email newsletters a mainstay of online and word-of-mouth marketing.
Email newsletters are the perfect confluence between what is traditionally thought of as Internet marketing and what ought to be thought of as modern, 21st-century, Word-of-Mouse Marketing.
Most professionals do their work in the offline world, but they are online throughout the day – usually through company email at the very least. Hundreds of messages inundate inboxes every day, and people often find that the only way to manage them (besides automated filters or forwarding to specific folders) is to routinely bulk delete all the spam and bacn we get.
Bacn is once-wanted, but now annoying, advertising email so many of us receive. It technically isn’t spam, but it does share some characteristics: Bacn isn’t solicited, and often it isn’t wanted.
So how do we, as marketing professionals and professionals who market, take advantage of the email marketing channel? Remember, it must be done without adding to the recipients’ clutter and wasting their time.
The most elegant answer is: the subject line.
So many companies use a variety of gimmicks in their subject lines. Most notably, you’ll see them using icons like little hearts, a mailbox or a little finger-pointing icon. Pictorial icons may attract attention, yet they often irritate, too. We all know that it’s trying to grab our attention. But if the email isn’t extremely timely or urgent to what we do and what we want, then it’s no more than an obstacle to our productivity and happiness.
The subject line, thus, must ideally be timely and eye-catching in other ways. 2 of the best practices for subject lines, which we use at phoneBlogger.net, include:
1. Numerals
Numerals are the symbols for numbers, like the numeral 7, as opposed to writing out the word “seven.” Numerals tend to be more eye catchy, modern, and social-media oriented as opposed to spelling out the words.
Using a numeral in the subject line usually means the article will be broken up into short pieces. For example, “4 Ways to do Something.” Even if it’s 23 ideas, at least those are 23 individual segments you can skim and skip around according to your time and availability.
Other numerals include dates, which usually imply some type of timeliness.
2. Punctuation
Punctuation can include hyphens, percentage sign, and of course exclamation points and question marks. Exclamation points can turn annoying very quickly, just like TYPING IN ALL CAPS. However, peppering an article or subject line with question marks can help guide the eye to specific segments that address those questions.
So there you have it: 2 subject line best practices we use and recommend at phoneBlogger.net.
Do you think subject lines using pictorial icons are annoying or cute? How often have you used numerals in your subject line?
Vikram Rajan
Telephone: (516) 642-4100
Email: Vik@phoneBlogger.net
Website: phoneBlogger.net
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