Ever try to write a subject line with just one word? Liz has been expiermenting with this since September 2024. Here’s the results and why Liz loves this so much.
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Episode 33: Subject Line Best Practices
Transcript
Hey, hey, hey, Liz Wilcox, the fresh princess of email marketing here. And you are listening to episode 78 of the email sound booth podcast. Lucky me. Thank you for listening. And this one’s going to be short and sweet. I think, I mean, according to my notes, but you never know. I’m already rambling. But we’re going to talk about a one little trick for your next subject line to try out.
This is something I’ve been experimenting with since September, 2024. And I’ve found that it makes my email writing super fun. Yes, I said email writing and fun all in the same sentence. You better believe it, sister or brother or whatever. I don’t care. Uh, as long as you’re listening, I appreciate you being here.
Uh, whatever, whoever you are. Okay. Anyway, that was awkward. I’m awkward, but this is not. This is a great, great tip. So have you ever tried a one word subject line? If you have been on my email list in the last six months, you have seen me do these. Now I started this back in September. I was actually watching or listening to another email marketer.
Uh, Kennedy from email marketing heroes, he was talking about subject lines and he said, you know, every once in a while, throw in a one word subject line. Uh, not only is it different, it actually looks different. So imagine you are actually scrolling on your phone, on your Gmail account, And, you know, everybody’s doing the same three to five sentence, or I’m sorry, three to five word, uh, subject line, but yours is just one word.
Like visually, it’s going to stand out, and I thought, ugh, Kennedy, so, so smart. I’m going to try that. I tried it, it worked really well, my email, I’m sorry, my email open rate went up like 5 percent and I was like, Oh, I’m going to do that again and again and again. And it went on mostly for about six weeks.
Then I went into launch mode. I went into 12 days of Lismas. Uh, and now in 2025, I’m bringing it back because it has just made things really fun. It’s made my open rate. Uh, go up a little bit. Um, and I’ll link in the show notes to another subject line, uh, podcast episode, if you want to get a better feel for subject lines, but if you’re looking to kind of vary things, you, you know, you need a jumpstart, uh, for your open rate, your engagement, try one word subject line.
So what I do. Is I write the email and I think, what’s a one word of this email or like, what’s the essence of this? For example, my very first newsletter for January, 2025, I opened it talking about, Oh, there’s all this pressure in the new year to start over and be energetic and, you know, save the world, you know, essentially, um, But, you know, it just is another day.
Like sure, you might have more energy, but you still got to lay your bricks, you know, build your wall brick by brick. Right. And so I thought, well, what I could, I could call it brick. I could call it, but you know, like, but I could call it, What could I call it? Oh, pressure. That’s really the thing. Like this is all about pressure.
Like, Oh, there’s all this pressure, but then we’re going to hit the pressure relief valve. We’re going to take pressure off. That’s the subject line. It was really fun and it had a great open rate, a lot of replies to it. Um, And yeah, so I’m, I am continuing the one word subject line. So the one word subject line, if you’re open to this, it can be kind of hard, but fun.
It’s a challenge, if you will. And it’s going to help you create intrigue. It’s going to help you stand out. Remember I said literally, visually, it helps you stand out. And here are some of my faves that I’ve sent in the last six months. My favorite was called debate. And it was actually sent by The day after the US presidential debate and it had nothing to do with that, um, but it created a lot of intrigue.
It was like, what? Liz is going to talk about politics? She never does that. Then they opened it. It was a debate on what we should name this podcast, which is now known as the email sound booth, right? Uh, there was another one called Patricia, which I didn’t even remember, but I was on our email marketing memberships live Q and a yesterday.
And someone said, Oh yeah, I remember there was an email called Patricia and it scared me because I thought something was wrong with Patricia. If you don’t know who Patricia is, you got to get on my email list, lizwillcox. com. She’s my amazing. biological sister and life manager. She runs pretty much everything behind the scenes of Liz Wilcox.
com email marketing membership and the email sound booth. Um, and it was just like, Oh, Patricia came to my house. She told me I should have a podcast episode about X, Y, Z. Here’s that podcast episode, which I’ll link that to the show notes too. Um, And, but it was funny that people were like, Oh my gosh, what’s wrong with Patricia?
Right? It created a lot of intrigue. There was another one that I did to a segment of the list called Nudge. It was people that were signed up for XYZ workshop. And it was just a nudge like, Hey, don’t forget to put that on your calendar. And that got a much higher open rate than the last time I ran a workshop where the subject line was don’t forget to put this on your calendar.
Right. Uh, so yeah, one word subject lines. Have you ever tried it? I would love for you to pop into the email sound booth, Facebook group. Let me know what you think about one word subject lines. If you’ve tried them, uh, if you try them after listening to this, pop in what your subject line was. Love to hear from you.
And of course, if you need more help with subject lines and writing your emails to begin with, you can always join my 9 a month membership, email marketing membership, where you get Content template emails with three subject line lines every single week. Uh, that’s 9 a month You can link or you can check out the link in the show notes.
It’s always open. I’m getting tongue tongue tied So I’m gonna end this hopefully you join the Facebook group email sound booth and the membership email marketing membership And I’ll see you on the next episode of the email sound booth podcast. Thanks so much.
