Email marketing may no longer be a high priority item on the marketing agenda for many of us. But there are many online marketers who still find email marketing to be useful and rightly so – email is still an effective communication medium between businesses and their prospective clients. Email marketing can do wonders but its success hinges on a crucial bit – subject line.

“Effective subject line is one of the essentials of a successful promotional email”; a fact most researches would agree upon. But how can such a trivial thing make or break an email’s success. The answer lies in the psychology of recipients, who uses subject line to decide the fate of an email. Recent studies have shown that over half of recipients use the subject line to decide, whether or not to open an email.

The content of a subject line is the key determinant, which decides whether a recipient will open an email, delete it, ignore it, mark it for future access, report it and/or filter it as spam. “Judging a book by its cover”, a thought frowned upon in literary circles, is prevalently used by email recipients to infer the content of an email. So if you think that you have truly optimized your email message, your work may be far from over.

A typical subject line does not have space for more than fifty characters. Many email applications like outlook and ISP will truncate anything longer than fifty characters. In such a scenario your subject line will fail to deliver its full impact. Fifty characters are all that stands in between the success or failure of an email campaign. With so much riding on the subject line, it makes it all the more important that it is written with due diligence.

Majority of the readers would think, “Well this is common sense”. But you would be amazed at the number of organizations, whether big or small, that fail to fully leverage the subject line to get their emails opened. A survey carried out by EmailLabs showed that open rate for subject lines with 0-49 characters was 12.5 percent higher than subject lines with 50+ characters. It was also observed that the click-through-rate was 75 percent higher using the same parameter.

The art of crafting an ideal email subject line, to entice recipients to read it, is as important as writing the email itself. The efforts required to draft a catchy email would go in vain, if the receiver of the email does not read it. There are no set rules or formula to write a good subject line. Although I can share with you some guidelines, which would make, your pursuit for a perfect subject line less daunting.

Ø Lead, but don’t mislead: Don’t stretch the truth in the subject line or promise more than the email can deliver. Readers will distrust you if your subject line doesn’t reflect the email content.

Ø Set the right expectation: The subject should clearly state what readers can expect from the email. An email would normally go unread if the subject line fails to connect with the reader.

Ø Avoid generic subject lines: Broad and generic subject lines are used by many marketers, trying to appeal to a wider audience. Instead, subject lines should be more focused and target a particular market segment.

Ø Experiment: Don’t be afraid to try subject lines that are more aggressive, creative, tantalizing or specific than you’re currently using.

Ø Continuous testing: Subject lines should be continuously tested to study styles and trends that generate high response rate. A particular subject line could work for some while it may not work for others.

Ø Beware of spam filters: Having finalized a few subject lines, make sure you run it through content checker. It will give suggestions on phrases and words that should be avoided.

A lot of work to get those 50 characters right! I might sound a bit fussy, but believe-you-me it pays for all the hard work.