Hello! Salut! Guten tag! Hallo! Salve! Hola! Goddag! Goedendag!
Every conversation has to begin somewhere. With any great email marketing, that conversation has to begin with a subject line.
A good subject line is the difference between your recipient engaging with your message… or skipping past it onto the next thing competing for their attention.
Creating the right subject lines is a big deal. Being able to find and optimize your wording is critical to the success of an email marketing campaign.
But getting it right takes time–and who has *that* in bountiful supply? Exactly.
With that in mind, here are some tips on how to create and test subject lines without too much heavy lift on your team.
Whilst it can be tempting to spend hours pondering long and complex subject line phrasing, often the simplest ideas are the best.
Consider only changing one variable at a time if you want to test the impact of that adjustment. Some examples to try include:
Marketing is often as much science as it is art. Although it can be difficult to accept, sometimes the ideas that feel the most creative, exciting, and enticing can be the ones that simply don’t resonate with your audience. Worse still, sometimes these can be the phrases that you and your team have taken hours to craft.
Although it can be easy to take this personally, there is opportunity in the disappointment. Remember that like art and humor, marketing is often highly subjective. If you want to know what works for your audience, go beyond the perspective of yourself and your team and let the data guide you.
Here’s how it can work:
Not only does this process allow you to learn a great deal from each mailing, you also get to empower your audience and let them indirectly decide the words, phrases, and structure you use when communicating with them. Furthermore, by taking quick ideas and using multiple suggestions to build out a subject line test, you save huge amounts of time debating the exact word choices.
It’s a win/win/win.
To really take things to the next level, there are new and emerging technologies that are designed to help marketers.
With Natural Language-Based Artificial Intelligence, it is possible to train your marketing platform to know what words and phrases resonate with your audiences, down to an individual level.
When using an AI subject line tool, the system will automatically build a virtual word profile for each recipient. So as you and your team are creating your A/B test potentials, your marketing platform can predict which subject lines will be most likely to drive an open for which recipients and can automatically select the right one.
Selligent’s Smart Subject tool is designed to do just that and is a more efficient way to do better marketing, faster. By radically reducing the manual effort needed to pick the optimal subject line to each contact, you can save significant amounts of time that would be needed to create A/B tests for every email.
Last but not least, with the power of AI on your side, you can go above and beyond. Smart Subject can give you instant feedback on your subject lines before you even send them. By pinpointing the words and phrases that will work best for your audience members, the system can identify the subject lines most likely to succeed, before you’ve even sent them.
Predicted open rates even before you launch the campaign? That’s the next level of efficiency!
Interested to learn more about our Smart Subject feature? Contact us and we’ll be happy to provide more details.
Marigold: where relationships take root.
