Successful Subject Lines for Targeted Email Campaigns

Over the past few years, more and more of our clients have discovered the wonders of targeted email campaigns. Because we’re part of a network of 15,000 niche career sites, we’re able to offer to our clients the ability to target up to 120 million candidates (8.5 million of which are college students and recent graduates — about half the U.S. population!) using any combination of 700 fields of data (i.e., geography down to the zip, experience, school, major, GPA, year in school, years since graduation, diversity, age, gender, disabilities, hobbies).

One of the key factors in the success of a targeted email campaign is the subject line, yet it is also one of the factors that too many clients pay too little attention to. I hope to change that because a successful subject line is a primary factor in driving up the open rate, which is the percentage of the emails which are delivered that are actually read by the recipient.
Subject lines are successful if they help the email get through the anti-spam filters (we promise 100 percent deliverability into the recipient’s inboxes but if they have anti-spam filters on their PCs then those emails are sometimes filtered into a spam folder — even if the emails are double opt-in like ours are), if they are compelling (the more compelling, the more opens), and if they’re truthful (no bait-and-switch).
To write a successful subject line, focus on the five factors deemed by VerticalResponse to be critical:

1. No punctuation as it is a big red flag to spam filters.
2. Do not use the word “free” or variations of it. Same problem.
3. Many email programs only show the first 40 characters so keep the subject line to 40 characters or less. If you can’t, then make sure the most critical information is in the first 40 characters or, better yet, stop writing like a lawyer (I’m a fully recovered lawyer) and start writing like a newspaper headline writer.
4. Don’t include your name. It is already in the “from” field. Only AOL email users can’t see the name in the “from” field, but there are fewer and fewer of those as more and more of them realize that there are real email programs out there.
5. Be clear about the benefit to the recipient contained in the email. They know that you want them to open the email, but why should they want to open the email?