You have spent ages writing a well worded, perfectly designed email campaign.  You sit back, proudly, and marvel at your work.  But then you notice you’ve forgotten to put in a subject line for the campaign.  You take a second and then write the first thing that comes into your head…”New low prices on our [insert product name here]!”…Congratulations. You have just managed to ruin your email campaign.  You might as well have just mashed your face into the keyboard and sent that out instead, it wouldn’t have made any difference as no-one will read it. 

In todays email marketing climate you can’t afford to be so careless with what can be considered one of the most important parts of your campaign.  Though the subject line can be considered a second thought at times, you have to think that your recipients aren’t going to care how good the content is in the newsletter, they will make a judgement there and then on whether they will read it.  This means that a lot of effort has to be put into constructing the right balance for your subject line.   

Your subject line should be appealing whilst at the same time not sound spammy.  Stefan Pollard offers a good way to check if your subject line may be flagged as spam in his article “How Spammy Subject Lines Hurt Delivery” and also gives an example of the consequences when you don’t pay enough attention to it. 

I think the best course of action is to, like the timing of your newsletters, be consistent in your subject line.  Make the subject line similar each time you send out a new newsletter and your recipients will come to recognise it.  And like Stefan Pollard suggested, go and check your bulk boxes and see what the spammers are writing, then write something that avoids this.

mailingmanager is a full e-marketing solutions company that also offers spam filter analysis on its customers email campaigns.  Visit the website or contact the company on info@mailingmanager.co.uk

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 3:15 pm and is filed under deliverability, newsletter design, email design, Spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.