How can marketers and copywriters create subject lines that improve clickthrough rate?

We’ll share our own discoveries in today’s next Web clinic – “Subject Lines Tested: How to write subject lines that double your clickthrough rate” – at 4 p.m. EDT. In this Web clinic, we’ll share what we learned from a recent experiment in which you, the MarketingExperiments blog readers, wrote the subject line treatments that we tested.

But, before we share what we discovered, let’s take a look at what your peers have learned about writing effective subject lines …

Forget tricks, focus on your audience

I have seen a lot of “tricks” suggested in various articles about how to improve email subject lines. Some say you should include the subscriber’s name. Others say to use a specific number in the text. Some suggest that you should include a question to make readers curious enough to open the message.

In my experience, the most important thing to consider when building a subject line is your audience. What problems and worries keep them up at night? What are they trying to achieve? What frustrations have they stubbed their toe on, time after time?

Once you identify their pain points and aspirations, go on to determine how your product or service can alleviate their frustrations and help them to achieve their goals. Then use these problem-solution pairs to build your content (or to optimize what you already have). This applies to your entire message, from subject lines, to email copy, to landing pages.

If you don’t have the right message, born from a fundamental understanding of your audience, no tricks of the trade can compensate. Even if you lure people into opening your email through crafty subject lines, without tailoring your message to the wants, desires and frustrations of your audience, your conversion rate suffers.

Unless your business model works differently than most of the clients I work with, you don’t get paid for email opens or even for clickthroughs. You get paid for leads captured and sales made. For email marketing, the subject line is extremely important since it’s the beginning of a conversation. However, even the snappiest “pick up line” will only get you so far, unless you back it up with substance.

– Steve Myers, senior optimization consultant, Adobe Systems Inc.

Keep it short

Think of your subject line as a tweet – only shoot for shorter. (Most critical info should fall within the first 50 characters so it doesn’t get cut off.)

– Shelly Lucas, senior marketing manager, Dun & Bradstreet

Always test, test, test (here are three ideas to try)

With so much noise in our inbox, here are three tips for standing out.

1. Make sure your customers can instantly recognize your brand and who’s sending it

It’s common to get emails from a brand with multiple sender names. You might get one message from John Scully, another from Mary Lou and then Jessica Lin. This could get real confusing for the subscriber. They may not remember or recognize whom that person is sending on behalf of until seeing the name several times if they even bother opening their emails. They also will have a hard time searching for your emails if they want to find an old one.

Solution: Either have every email sender have the brand name for their email (you guys do this effectively) or put the brand right at the beginning of the subject line, preferably in brackets. Example — From: Daniel Burstein, Subject: [MarketingExperiments] Share A Subject Line Tip & Get Featured

Having the brand in the recipient slot, I think, is better, but the latter is better than nothing, especially when you have a loyal following that looks for your emails.

2. Start some emails with a statement in brackets

Examples:

[Last Chance] Submit Your Tip in The Next 2 Hours or Miss Out!

[Video] Subject Line Tricks from The Masters

What this does is catch the reader’s attention right away and frames the email. They don’t have to read the whole subject line to get interested. The brackets often do the job. Not to mention, the emails will stand out just because most other subjects likely don’t have brackets.

This leads to my next tip.

3. Be different visually

Forget about how clever the wording is for a minute. If you have a long list of emails that you are looking at, what is going to draw your attention to read the headline because otherwise the wording doesn’t matter much, right?

• One would be the brackets that I talked about above. They’re different and draw attention.
• Capitalizing certain words. This will likely help draw attention. All caps could be a bit much.
• Including numbers, especially big numbers. You don’t see numbers that often in subject lines.
• Using quotes for certain wordage
• Being very short, for example “did you get this yet?” or “check it out”

Playing around with these embellishments is a good idea to make you stand out since it is about getting attention first.

Of course, there are tons more, but I’ll stop it there and leave by saying always try new techniques, but never take them as absolutes. Always test, test, test!

– Michael A. Schauer, founder and head multiplier, Multiplied Marketing

Related Resources

Subject Lines Tested: How to write subject lines that double your clickthrough rate – Today, May 16 at 4 p.m. EDT

Elements of effective subject lines

Subject Line Test: 125% more unique clickthroughs

Email Research: The 5 best email variables to test

In a recent Web clinic planning meeting, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS, discussed some elements that determine how effective a subject line is …

In Wednesday’s free Web clinic, “Subject Lines Tested: How to write subject lines that double your clickthrough rate,” Flint will cover all four elements that can help you determine the effectiveness of your subject lines.

Plus, we’ll review the results of the subject line test the MarketingExperiments blog audience participated in, and see what greater lessons can be learned from the results.

Related Resources

“Subject Lines Tested: How to write subject lines that double your clickthrough rate” — Web clinic on May 16, 4:00–5:00 p.m. EDT

Email Testing: Subject line increases opens 12.7% … here’s why we’ll never use it again

Subject Line Test: 125% more unique clickthroughs

Email Subject Lines: Longer subject increases opens 8.2%

Email Testing: More specific subject line improves open rate by more than 35%

In the below video excerpt from a recent MarketingExperiments Web clinic – “Quick Win Clinic (Part I): The 5 easiest changes to make to your landing pages right now” – Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS, and Zuzia Soldenhoff-Thorpe, Research Manager, MECLABS, offer optimization tips for an Android app push message.

“Consumers are so frustrated by confusing messages. To optimize, you have to see with the eyes of the customer. They’re frustrated and busy,” Flint said.

“Why do people say yes? Because they perceive the value outweighs the cost.”

To ensure your value outweighs the cost, it helps to put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Sure, the product feature or offer seems really impressive to you. You’ve created it. Or, at the very least, you’ve worked on the marketing piece long enough to drink the Kool-Aid.

To really make sure you don’t frustrate or alienate your busy customer or prospect, you need to ask what Flint calls the two most important words in marketing (well, actually Flint emphatically used three words in the video) …

So what?

Think of your offers, product features and, frankly, everything you do in your marketing. For example …

• 25% off – So what? Unless the customer understands the value of your product first, this offer is worthless. Getting 25% off a concert ticket is absolutely meaningless to me. However, if you offer me 25% off tickets to a Pearl Jam concert, I would quickly tell you my credit card number is 5984 98 …
• The air-conditioned glove box – So what? Just because the product development team has been able to add a feature or function to your product doesn’t mean it has any value for your customer.
• Now with Gleeben^TM – So what? Does your customer really care about the branded way you’ve been able to talk about a formerly commoditized feature or service? Just because you can trademark it doesn’t mean you’re really communicating value to the customer.

Step into your customer’s shoes

We work so hard on our marketing campaigns that it’s easy to think of them as our babies. And, if you’re like most mammals, you have a serious attachment to your own offspring.

You have to look at your marketing campaigns as the comedian, Louis CK, looks at other people’s children, “You’re not mine. I don’t love you. Do you understand? I don’t have any – no love. None. I don’t even have an instinct to protect you.”

Then ask, “So what?”

And if that’s too hard at first, it might be best to practice on other people’s marketing.

“You probably say, ‘So what?’ every day as you’re scanning through your email inbox reading subject lines,” said Adam Lapp, Associate Director of Optimization and Strategy, MECLABS. “The ones that answer that question to your satisfaction are the ones you open. Everything else gets trashed.”

Related Resources

Value Proposition: Revealing hidden value in your products and offers

Customer Value: The 4 essential levels of value propositions

Value Prop: Is there true value in your marketing proposition?

So you think you have a good lead generation page? Prove it. Simply submit your URL in the comments section of this blog post.

At Optimization Summit 2012 in Denver, we’ll be holding a live test throughout the event for a lead generation page for HubSpot All-in-One Marketing Software. This live test is sponsored by HubSpot.

We’re going to test the control and two treatments, one created at the event by the audience. Treatment A will come from the audience at Optimization Summit. They’ll decide which hypothesis they want to test, and based on that, we’ll select a landing page for Treatment A.

For a second treatment, we’re looking for a good template for a lead generation page from the MarketingExperiments blog audience. We will stick the winning audience-submitted page into HubSpot’s built-in A/B testing tool and use the layout as a template, with the same copy from the control, as Treatment B.

If this Treatment B beats the Control and the Treatment A at Optimization Summit 2012, the marketer that submitted the lead generation page will win a free MarketingExperiments Landing Page Optimization Online Course plus a free copy (both PDF and printed copy) of the MarketingSherpa 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report. That’s a combined value of $1,142.

Here’s how you can enter your high-performing landing page and win:

1. Submit the URL for your top lead generation page in the comments section of this blog post by Thursday, May 17^th
2. Our judges – Adam Lapp, Tony Doty and Erin Fagin – will pick the top five landing pages
3. We’ll post the top five landing pages right here on the MarketingExperiments blog and let the audience vote on which page they think is the best
4. Now it all comes down to conversion. If your page is selected, and it beats the Control and Treatment A in the Optimization Summit live test … you win!

Good luck! And may the best page win.

[Note: Submitting a comment with a subject line on this blog post constitutes acceptance of the terms and conditions of the MarketingExperiments Lead Generation Page Contest.]

Related Resources:

Landing Page Optimization: Test ideas for a B2B lead capture page

Website Optimization: 7 ways to reduce the perceived cost of lead generation offers

Landing Page Optimization: Value-focused revamp leads to 188% lead gen boost, increase in personal interaction

Picture your sales and marketing funnel in your head for just a moment. If you’re like many marketers, you likely spend a lot of time, money and effort driving traffic to your landing page. Then, once they’re on your landing page, you likely spend a lot of time, money and effort to get customers to a form …

… and then what? You can’t simply cut the engine and hope that the momentum that got them this far will coast them through the form to conversion.

“Perhaps this is the mistake I see the most on landing pages,” said Adam Lapp, Associate Director of Optimization and Strategy, MECLABS.

“A good headline, good copy, everything executed well … then the visitor gets to the form and it simply says ‘Request more info’ or ‘View our demo’ or ‘Contact a Sales Rep’ with forms below.”

Let’s take a look at those three commonly used phrases and see what Adam suggests to help you create a process-level value proposition for each one of them.

Not this

Request more info

But this

By filling out the information below, you will receive [a full brochure OR a five-step guide to x, y, and z OR a call within 24 hours from an xyz expert].

Not this

View our demo

But this

The demo takes only three minutes and will show you [how the product works in real time OR patented control features that save 30% more time OR the five best ways to use the product].

Not this

Contact a Sales Rep

But this

Complete the form below to speak to a product expert who will be able to [answer any questions OR provide details about the core features OR discuss pricing and needs].

Never assume your customer understands the value of the action you are asking him to take

After all, when you lift your head up out of analytics and marketing automation platforms for just a minute and look at the big picture, your job as a marketer simply comes down to this – communicating the true value of whatever action you’d like your prospect to take.

Related Resources:

Common Landing Page Mistakes: Too simple of a landing page for a complex sale

Common Landing Page Mistakes: E-commerce sites treating new and returning visitors the same

Marketing Campaign: Landing page optimization can help improve the return on your media spend

Common Landing Page Mistakes: Too simple of a landing page for a complex sale

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, here are the most (and least) effective email elements to test and optimize …

Click to enlarge

So, how can you use this information to improve your own testing efforts? The MarketingExperiments Email Messaging Optimization Index heuristic is a tool to help organize your thinking and analysis of your email marketing tests …

eme = rv(of + i) – (f + a) ^©

Wherein:

eme = email messaging effectiveness index
rv = relevance to the consumer
of = offer value (why)
i = incentive to take action
f = friction elements of process
a = anxiety about entering information

The MarketingExperiments Email Messaging Online Course teaches the full heuristic, but at a very high level, the heuristic helps you focus on the positive and negative forces that can affect your email messaging effectiveness. Let’s see how the heuristic relates to the top two most effective elements from the MarketingSherpa research (MarketingSherpa, like MarketingExperiments, is a MECLABS company).

Positive forces that affect email messaging effectiveness

On the positive side, you must ask yourself, “How relevant is my email to my customer? How valuable is the offer, and how strong is the incentive to take action?”

This is why target audience testing is so effective. What is relevant and valuable to one customer on your list might not be to another customer. By better targeting your offers and incentives to tap into what different segments of your list find relevant and valuable, you will improve the effectiveness of your email messaging. Testing can help inform this process.

Negative forces that affect email messaging effectiveness

Those positive forces drive your customer to act. You can think of them as the propulsion of an airplane. But much like drag, negative forces, the friction elements of the process and anxiety about entering information, discourage your customer from converting.

“For industries where the sale involves deeply personal information regarding finances or fitness levels, landing pages provide additional evidence to make the reader at ease to move forward on the path to purchase,” said W. Jeffrey Rice, Senior Research Analyst, MECLABS, and lead author of the Email Marketing Benchmark Report. “This is apparent in the education and healthcare fields, wherein 67% of organizations reported landing page optimization as very effective.”

Related Resources:

Marketing Research: Top email elements to test

Research Update: The state of email marketing testing and optimization

Email Marketing Optimization: Email messaging 101

Email Marketing Research: 7 steps for successful email marketing testing and optimization

Subject Lines Tested: How to write subject lines that double your clickthrough rate – Wednesday, May 16, 2012, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. EDT