15 Power Words To Get Your Emails Opened
Dive deep into the core of what you really want to say to your audience. Spend some time writing a number of different subject lines for your email campaign, as it’s likely your best one will take some time to come up with. We know this sounds like more work, but think of the thousands of people reading what you have to say.
Step One:
Write 15 plus potential subject lines for your email campaign. Whilst it may seem like a lot of effort, it forces you to think outside the box. Get beyond the obvious and basic ones and start to get creative once you have managed to get 10 out. The last few will probably be the best ones.
Step Two:
Gain some independent insight into the emotional value of your new subject line. Run them through the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer. Used in an email marketing context, you can simply enter your subject lines into the tool and it will return to you a score of between 0 and 100, based on the emotional marketing value of the subject line you created.
Here is a link to access the ’emotional marketing value’ of your subject line.
Advanced Marketing Institute
What is the EMV Index? Back in the 60s and 70s, government research scholar Dr. Hakim Chishti was studying the roots of several languages including Persian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, and Urdu. Through his research he found that there are basic underlying harmonics in language, that are always interpreted with the same “emotional” reactions. While the meaning of a set of words can be mistaken, the sound tones made when those words are said in a sentence are always interpreted the same way in our emotional response. From these findings, the EMV Index was born. It is essentially an algorithm that assesses how a group of words follows these emotional harmonics, and how likely they are to elicit an emotional response from a reader. So, in the context of email marketing, it can be used to assess how much of an emotional response a particular set of words (like a subject line) will generate. A perfect EMV Index score would be 100%, but that is rare unless your subject line is quite short. A good score would rank anywhere from 40% to 75%.
Step Three:
Use the two highest scoring subject lines in an A/B test. When you’re setting up your email campaign, set it up as a subject line A/B test and enter the 2 highest-scoring subject lines from your original list.
As a Pebble Mailer customer, the tool will then send a version of your campaign with each subject line to a small portion of your list then, based on which email gets the most opens or clicks, it will automatically send the winning subject line to the rest of your list.
In Conclusion
Better subject lines means more opens of your email campaigns, and more opens leads to more click-throughs, more conversions and more revenue for your business.
The 15 Most Powerful Words In Subject Lines
The inbox is a hostile place. With a squillion other emails jostling for your subscribers’ limited attention, it’s important that you make your subject line stand out – and get your email opened.
First word: (some can also be used as last word)
- Invitation
- Introducing
- We
- A
- Your / You / You!
- Year, eg. 2015
- Update
- New
- Month name, eg. June
- Special / Specials
- News
- Sale / Sale!
- Events
- Offer / Offers
How can I further improve my subject lines?
There are a few trends that can be found by looking at the above Power Words.
Personalisation – It’s said that a person’s favourite word is their own name and now, we have the facts to back this up. Without a doubt, subject lines that are personally addressed, do the best – just don’t forget to test!
Personal pronouns work, too – Don’t have your subscribers’ names handy? The popularity of “We” and “You/Your” shows that subject lines that make some kind of appeal to the reader are more likely to get a response.
Make it timely – Another trend to note is that subject lines that feature dates, or urgency seem to perform better than those that don’t. Holding your subscribers to a date to act, or letting them know that you’re waiting on them (with say, “Invitation”) can be a very persuasive tactic.
Be exciting! – Research has shown that subject lines that end with an exclamation mark tend to result in more opens than those that don’t. Whilst we don’t encourage everyone to go overboard with enthusiastic exclamations (!!), it’s certainly interesting to see how a little extra energy in your subject line impacts email behaviour.
All sounding too hard? We are always here to help, so give us a call or send through an email
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