Email subject lines are critical to fetching you opens and click-throughs; it’s no secret. They are the first glimpse that recipients get of your emails, and should they fail to hit all the right notes, encouraging your subscribers to interact with your campaigns can become nigh impossible. Especially in this day and age of raging email fatigue and just, information explosion in general, subject lines have become more critical than ever.
With hundreds and thousands of emails clamoring for your target audience’s attention all at once, you need to be spot-on with them if you wish to have a realistic shot at catching their eyeballs. And what better way is there to level up the appeal of your subject lines than to infuse them with personalization? Writing subject lines that are in sync with your customer’s demographics, interests and preferences, and their overall profile is a surefire way of rising above the clutter and getting them to listen to you.
Wondering how you can go about it? That’s exactly what we are here to talk about in this blog. Read on to find out!
Use the Recipient’s First Name
While this might be the oldest trick in the email subject line personalization book, it continues to retain its charm to date. Addressing your recipients using their first name helps you instantly establish a personal connect with them; it makes them feel important, and, thus, that much more receptive to your messages. Out of the deluge of subject lines that would be swarming their inboxes, one that flashes their name, loud and clear, is sure to catch their notice, don’t you think?
This is also among the easier personalization maneuvers to execute, which is why a lot of brands resort to it in their broadcast email campaigns as well. At the same time, however, be absolutely sure to test such campaigns before hitting the send button lest you end up delivering a subject line that says “Hello <first name>!” rather than the designated proper noun. The damage engendered by such scenarios would be immense, tarnishing your brand reputation by great proportions.
Acknowledge Milestones
If you wish to inspire unwavering loyalty from your subscribers, you have to let them know, at every feasible instant, that their relationship with you extends way, way beyond the transactions they make with you. What’s a good way of going about that, you ask? Well, acknowledging milestones- birthdays and anniversaries- is an excellent starting point, if you ask us.
No matter what kind of a birthday enthusiast you are (there are two kinds; we all know which we are), you’d certainly agree that a wish coming your way does a brilliant job of bringing a smile to your face, doesn’t it? Now, imagine your inbox chiming with a birthday wish from your favorite brand. Your soft spot for them would definitely intensify, you’d agree? And as a brand, you are always eager for brownie points. Besides, this is not information that is particularly difficult to obtain either, for this is something that invariably every business requests of their visitors in their sign-up forms. And if, at all, your sign-up form didn’t have that data field, to begin with, you can always conduct an innocuous survey to gather the same. Once you have this information, all you have to do is setup automated workflows on the respective dates.
Next, let’s talk about anniversaries. Now, these can be of two types:
- Customer anniversary- The number of years a customer has been associated with a brand.
- Brand anniversary- The number of years a business has been in existence.
Whatever the occasion, it is undeniably special, and addressing the same in your subject lines can light up your recipient’s eyes, eventually nudging them to engage enthusiastically with your emails.
Target Subscribers’ Interests
Maybe a decade ago, accomplishing this would have been a tall order. In 2023, however, it’s quite straightforward, thanks, in no small part, to the plethora of customer data which marketers have at their disposal these days. That said, they still have to put in their fair share of hard yards to put said data at their service. The first step involves segmenting your email list divide your audience into different sections based on various parameters like age, gender, occupation, browsing history, past purchases, position in the sales funnel, and the like.
What this would do is give you an extremely lucid idea of all the diverse buyer personas that are interacting with your brand. Subsequently, you will be able to curate unique subject lines corresponding to the interests of each individual segment. Imagine, as a chinos lover, being alerted to the latest chinos collection by your favorite clothing brand. Likewise, your friend, suppose a cargo pants lover, gets notified of the same by the brand. At the end of the day, the business was able to make two of its customers happy, with two different offerings, thanks to the power of segmentation-fueled personalization.
Test Without Fail
A/B/n testing, ever the indispensable component of an email marketing toolkit, further skyrockets its stocks when it comes to personalization. You see, with personalization, you are no longer merely trying to sell to your audience; you are trying to foster a dialogue, a synergy, boldly proclaiming that you care about delivering value to your customers. And this requires you to be ABSOLUTELY sure about what will resonate with your audience and not. Any and all half measures, guesswork, and assumptions need to be promptly shown the way out.
After you have zeroed in a few subject line versions which you feel have the highest probability of coaxing a reaction out of your recipients, subject them to split testing to identify the most successful one and implement it in your campaign.
Wrapping It Up
Personalized subject lines hold the key towards driving increased engagement, interactions, and, ultimately conversions, in today’s competitive email marketing environment. We hope the insights shared above will prove to be beneficial to you as you sit down to design your future email campaigns.
Kevin George is Head of Marketing at Email Uplers, one of the fastest growing custom email design and coding companies, and specializes in crafting professional email templates, PSD to HTML email conversion and free responsive HTML email templates in addition to providing email automation, campaign management, and data integration & migration services. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz and eats and breathes email marketing. He enjoys sharing his insights and thoughts on email marketing best practices on his blog.
Subject lines stock imager by bangoland/Shutterstock
