A Little More On Subject Lines

Last time, I talked about elements to keep in mind when writing or selecting the subject line for your next email campaign. Now, I would like to briefly cover some ways that you can continue to improve the effectiveness of your subject lines and, in effect, your campaign as a whole.

After you have finished your initial brainstorming and have a list of possible subject lines for the particular campaign you’re currently focused, bring in some outside perspectives to keep your thinking fresh and catch issues you might otherwise overlook. It’s often a good practice to get the opinion of an individual or two that work in your industry along with a few from outside of it. The former will be able to give you pointers from a senders perspective, such as what has worked for them in the past, whereas the latter will be able to give you more of a “real world” point of view.

Once you’ve narrowed the possibilities down to a short list of subject lines you feel comfortable putting out in front of a live audience, you’re ready to test your creations. The ongoing testing of email campaigns is a three part, repeating process that consists of pretesting, testing, and review. Pretesting is a powerful tool that can provide you with information you can use to refine your subject line selection or narrow multiple choices down to the one that has shown to be most effective in the preliminary tests.

Start the pretesting process by sending out trial runs of your email campaign utilizing the different subject lines you would like to test. Review the results to get a glimpse of what worked best on test subjects. Avoid redundancy by continuing to test and create new subject lines. It is likely you will find new ways to segment your mailing lists through regular testing. Different types of subject lines work best depending on your target market, your industry, and laundry list of other variable. This is precisely what makes testing such an integral part of running effective email marketing campaigns that you can learn and grow from.

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