Episode 33: Subject Line Best Practices


Writing subject lines got you trippin’? Here are some different kinds, what makes the best subject lines, and tons of examples for you to steal for you own.

Link to waitlist: https://lizwilcox.com/waitlist/


Transcript​

    What’s up? Liz Wilcox here, the fresh princess of email marketing. Yes, she really does call herself that folks. Anyway, you are listening to episode 33 of the email sound booth podcast. I feel so lucky that you’re here and I feel really excited about this episode because I got this idea from someone in the email sound booth Facebook group.

So if you’re not in there yet, Go to the show notes, click the Facebook link, add yourself. I would love to have you over there in the conversation. We’ve got over 6, 000 people in that Facebook group, so check it on out. Anyway, we’re going to talk about subject lines. I know, super exciting, right? Yeah, not really.

Subject lines, Liz, oh my gosh, they are difficult. Well, sometimes yes, but also, and I say it with love, you might be just overthinking it. So, let’s talk about the best subject lines. The best sh sh bleh, bleh, bleh. One day I’m going to get an editor to, uh, you know, edit out all my bleh bleh blehs. All right, the best subject lines are short, but descriptive enough to get the reader to open.

Uh, The best subject lines keep the reader in mind. They’re not SEO driven, right? They’re written from the perspective of, I know my reader, what would they open, right? So your specific reader. Uh, and the best subject lines are not always the same as you always do it, meaning vary the way you write subject lines, which this is where people get tripped up.

So don’t let me trip you up. Really, what all that means is subject line should open a loop, right? We’ve all heard of open loops, closed loops, right? If I say something like, you’re never going to believe this, that opens a loop. Believe what, Liz? It gets you curious. It gets your interest piqued, right? That would be a good subject line.

You’re never going to believe this. Is that what I just said? I think so. Write that down. Am I recording? Gosh, actually, am I recording? Whew, I am recording. We’re two minutes in. Okay. Um, they create curiosity, right? So it might be something like, the surprising, the surprising truth about XYZ, the feedback I wasn’t expecting.

Those are things that open the loop. The surprising truth about, what about XYZ? Uh, the feedback I wasn’t expecting. What were you expecting? Right? So, Here are some types of subject lines. If you’re the type of person that needs, you know, the spreadsheet, you need the bullet points, here are the bullet points, right?

Certain types of subject lines. So number one, there’s questions. Pretty simple to explain questions. Here are a few examples, right? Beach or mountains? Have you been here yet? What’s on your bucket list? Can I have nine dollars? So the can I have nine dollars? Uh spoiler alert is actually my best performing email ever Why?

Because I think it evokes curiosity like crazy It keeps my reader in mind. Usually my reader You know, they’re in the online business space and so many people try to skirt around asking people for money and you might even be thinking, oh I could never be so bold, right? I know that about my audience and so I knew this would be so very like audacious and thought provoking and I can’t believe she did that.

What does she need nine dollars for? Let me open it, right? So those are question subject lines, pretty self explanatory, but remember they’re short and descriptive. Oh my gosh, I cannot say that word today. Short and descriptive enough to get the reader to open, right? All right, the second type are personalized.

This is where you literally, uh, just use their first name or you can, uh, personalize it. Like if you did have segments on your list, um, and let’s say you’re for ease of analogy here, you’re a shoes salesman, right? And you have people, you know, you have people in Florida and you know, you have people in Montana and you have people in Maine, right?

So you could segment those out and depending on. what tag or segment you could personalize the subject line to, you know, Florida residents by the shoe, Montana residents by the shoe. You get what I’m saying, right? So you can personalize with the first name or, you know, different conditions or tags that you have, depending on the, um, capacity and capabilities of your email service provider.

So a couple other would be maybe Shahara. Don’t miss out. Roberto, it’s not too late. This is funny, Warren, right? It just piques their curiosity. Now, I want to tell you use this sparingly. If you used this all the time, it would become, you know, they’d become sort of blind to it, uh, so to speak, right? They’d kind of skim over it.

If I always put your first name. In the subject line, you’re gonna, you know, you’re just gonna ignore it eventually. So you want to use, and that’s why there’s so many different types, right? You don’t want to use the same all, all the time. I use a first name either when I really, really, really need your feedback, like if I’m sending out a very important survey, or if I really, really want you to hit reply, or a sales email.

Usually, I will reserve these for the end of cart, like on the last day. Um, by the way, you get my launch course for free if you buy my Black Friday offer. It’s all in, I talk, I go a lot more in depth on when to send emails and how many during a launch. But anyway, back to subject lines. In the, um, last day, in one of the last emails.

Usually I send three to five emails on the last day of a launch. So I would send this maybe like email three, four or five with their first name saying like, Hey, this really is the last chance. Or I would send it in the middle of a launch because the middle of the launch. And again, I teach this in my launch course, um, is when the sales kind of dip down.

Right. And so we want to get their attention again. And so you might use, you know, don’t miss out on this bonus. Right? Something like that. All right. Another type is numbered or brackets type of subject lines. So if you’re inside email marketing membership, you already know I use these for EMM. So every time I send out an email that has to do with my membership, it has brackets.

So on Monday morning, when you get a template, uh, delivered straight to your inbox, it says in brackets, New EMM, meaning you’re getting a new template. If I’m doing a live q and a or I’m giving you some kind of bonus, uh, you know, it would just say brackets. EMM. I also do this with my annual pass holders, which I’m so excited to be opening up the pass on November 25th.

Uh, hint hint liz wilcox.com/waitlist for that. Um, and so I will say pass holder on it because pass holders are different than the typical. 9 a month membership, uh, member, right? They get exclusive perks, like all my other products for free, extra co working, guided, uh, email writing, and things like that, and so it would say pass on it or passholder in the brackets.

You can also do numbered, uh, which, let’s say you’re doing a series, an email series, you might put, you know, 9 a month. Uh, the name of the series, 1, 2, 3, in those brackets, right? Uh, the next one is funny subject lines. These could be, you know, quotes from movies that they’ll get. And this is really important.

Remember at the top I said, you know, know who your reader is. It’s very important to know who your reader is so you can do funny things like this, right? If I have a list full of, uh, fans of The Office, and I’m doing nothing but Seinfeld quotes, and they might not find it as funny, right? So know who your list is so you can know what to quote, what they’ll think is funny, um, Etc.

Oh, a better example of this is when I was a travel blogger, right? I lived in an RV. The black tank is where the sewage goes, right? So I would always, I would, might send an email that says something like, curse of the black tank. That’s something only our viewers would understand. So it’s going to endear me to them, right?

Okay. The next one is also pretty self explanatory. Emoji subject lines. Uh, yes, I like emojis. Again, I use these sparingly, right? I don’t put emojis in every single email. Now you could if that was your thing, right? And experiment what feels good for you, right? Um, but I say use emojis. kind of like you use the personalized names when you really want to capture their attention.

You don’t have to wait for sales emails, uh, to use emojis. Uh, for example, when I launched this podcast, I really wanted people to open the email. So I put that emoji that, you know, rocket launch emoji in there. The next is curiosity based. Again, self explanatory, right? How can we. Make a subject line where it’s pure curiosity.

It’s pure, oh my gosh, what the heck are they talking about here? Uh, here are a few examples. We kept our promise. Don’t open this. Take a look please. Quick question. Mistakes you’re making around your relationship. All of these get your wheels turning, right? We kept our promise. What promise? Don’t open this.

Why not? Take a look, please. Okay. Quick question. What question? Mistakes you’re making around your relationship. What mistakes? Right? These are all curiosity based. And the last one is urgent or time based. This is where you can use words like last chance, urgent, breaking, alert. And remember, you can mix all these together, right?

And a time based email could also be a curiosity based email, could also be numbered or bracket, personalized, funny, right? Um, you know, we could turn something like urgent, time based might be, are you free at 5 p. m. tonight? That’s a question subject line too, right? Or we could say, Um, you know, are you free at 5 p.

m. tonight? Shahara, right? Or we could change it to don’t open this after 5 p. m. tonight. Right? Alright. So, now that we’re 11 minutes in, we’ve gotten, you know, best subject lines, kind of best practices, we’ve gotten the types. Now let’s actually write the subject lines. How do we actually do that? Right? Um, sorry, I’m out of breath.

Uh, if you don’t know this about me, I have a lot of food allergies, and, uh, one of the symptoms when I eat certain foods is I get out of breath and my nose itches, so I’m kind of struggling right now. But anyway, back to subject lines. I just didn’t want you to think, you know, I’m dying over here if I’m breathing into the mic too heavily.

So write the subject line. Like a friend, right? We’re not writing this for SEO. I think I already mentioned that at the top. We’re not writing this, you know, to feed some sort of algorithm. When we’re in the inbox, we’re actively searching for something that we want to read, right? We’ve got our phone out.

It’s like, oh, that’s a bill. Archive, that’s on autopay. That’s this, that’s that. Um, and so we want to write like a friend. As in this person just sent this to me, okay? So instead of saying something like, you know, uh, webinar tonight at 5, we would write, are you free at 5? Cause that’s just me. What we would say to a friend, right?

The next tip I want to give you when it comes to writing the subject line is make it like three to five words Okay, if you’re not watching YouTube, I’m like putting up my hands, right? We’re on, we’re on mobile, most likely, right? When we’re checking our emails. So three to five words is gonna come across the screen really, you know, nicely.

Anything more than that is going to be too much. We’re not going to be able to see the whole subject line, so it’s just a waste. Uh, also, I think I mentioned this, vary your subject lines. Look at the subjects on the subjects that you wrote in the last four, five, six weeks. Have you used, you know, a personalized subject line in the last couple months?

Maybe now it’s time to bring it back. Have you used a question? Have you used too many questions? Maybe, uh, maybe an emoji is the right time right now. So, vary. Uh, vary your subject lines. Something that I did recently was experiment with my subject lines. So in all of September and most of October, I did one word subject lines.

And let me tell you, do not start out like that. That was incredibly difficult to, you know, How do I create just enough curiosity to, you know, open a loop with people without being annoying or too ambiguous. Um, so that’s, but that’s something I experimented with for about six weeks, and now that, you know, I’m gearing up for Black Friday, I’m sending daily emails right now, I kind of needed to go back to the varied content, to, you know, personalized, numbered, funny, emoji, curiosity based, time based, right?

Um, but with my newsletters, I actually found that the one word subject line, while it was harder for me to write, my open rate did increase just a little bit. Why? Because when you think about, you know, you’re not just competing with your last email, right? I just told you to look at your last emails and vary your subject line content.

but you’re competing with all the other emails in their inbox. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t use capital letters in most of my subject lines, because I know a lot of the spam or more formal emails, bigger companies do. So I want it to stand out among all the other emails. And that’s why I use, you know, lowercase letters for the most part.

And that is why I experimented with the one word because I find most people use three to five words. What if I just use one for a while? And I found that it really, really did increase my click rate, or I’m sorry, my open rate. And then, you know, once the the open rate started going back down to normal, I went back to a normal, you know, three to five words.

All right. Now I want you to write the subject line after you write the email. And I actually, you know, I, I subscribed to a couple other email marketers and I heard an, or I read an email marketer said, Oh, she hates when she does that. And they, uh, you know, they didn’t recommend doing that, but I’m like, wait, what?

Like you don’t write the title of your book. before you write the book, uh, that makes no sense. Of course, write the subject line after writing the email. Uh, how do you, I mean, if it helps guide you to write the subject line first, go for it. But please, please, please, I’m begging you to review your subject line after your email to make sure it still makes sense.

So I just, you know, unless I’ve got just a hundred word, uh, email, I know what it’s going to be about. I always wait until the end. And last, of course, get some help with subject lines. Of course, you know, when you’re As a member of email marketing membership, you know, every template I send you, I send three to five subject lines with it.

Also you can search for hundreds of them within the email, uh, marketing membership template library. You can just type in the word subject line. Uh, they will pop right up for you. And even if you’re not a member, you can go directly to Liz Wilcox. com. If you scroll down, there’s actually a subject line generator right on my homepage.

You don’t even have to opt in. Uh, and my freebie, if you do get my freebie, if you go to LizWilcox. com, hit the hot pink button, you get 52 subject lines, uh, delivered straight to your inbox. And then, when all else fails, if Liz Wilcox doesn’t give you enough, there is ChatGPT. Put your email, write your email, put it in there, and ask it to give you 10, 20, 30 subject lines for that email.

Chances are, it’ll give you the inspiration. You need to write your own or you’ll find the perfect one within there. Alright, so that’s subject lines in a nutshell, in a 17 minute nutshell. Hopefully that helped you out today. If it did, I’d love for you to subscribe. To, you know, leave a review in the review section of this podcast, I think is what it’s called.

Uh, let me know how today’s episode helped you. And as always, uh, I’d love for you to be a member of the email marketing membership if you’re not, but go to lizwillcox. com slash waitlist. So you can become an annual pass holder and get all my products for free, get an entire year of EMM free. for just 108 bucks.

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