Best Practices for Email Subject Lines in 2024

Email subject lines are crucial to your marketing campaigns. They help make the first impression on your email recipients. You wouldn’t want anything less than creating a highly effective subject line that grabs their attention.

All this means that the subject line can determine whether someone will open an email or not. So, it is important to optimize your email subject lines. What can you do to increase the success rate of your email campaigns?

Here are the best practices for email subject lines in 2024.

1. Study Your Audience & Learn about their Needs

When you know your target audience, you are better positioned to understand their needs, desires, and struggles. This knowledge should help you address these key factors and connect better with them.

You can create more effective and relevant subject lines when you know the target audience that you want to reach. This can not only help get your message across more effectively but it can also save you time and effort.

Follow these approaches to conduct audience research:

Questionnaires & surveys
Social listening & analytics
Competitive analysis

2. Ask Questions in Subject Lines

When done right, questions can make great email subject lines. The benefit of using questions is that they create interest. Creating curiosity increases the chances of getting your email opened.

Follow these tips when creating a question-based subject line:

Consider how your product/service can benefit the recipient
When it comes to newsletters, consider the general question that the content answers
Create a question that triggers the recipient’s curiosity

3. Personalize Your Subject Lines

It will be best to personalize your subject lines with the recipient’s name or location. This can be done with the help of merge tags.

Studies show that personalization improves open rates. It can also be highly effective when integrated with automated emails such as post-purchase messages and anniversary offers.

Email list segmentation allows you to add more personalized details than just the recipient’s name. You can group your subscribers based on the following factors before sending them out emails with more personalized subject lines:

Location
Shopping behavior
Age
Interests
Gender

Personalization has the power to improve email:

Open rates
Click-through rates
Click-to-open rates

It can also help reduce unsubscribe rates.

4. Create Short & Sweet Subject Lines

Always create subject lines that are short and sweet. Keep these points in mind when addressing these factors:

The subject line has only up to 2 seconds the grab the email recipient’s attention
There is a character limit on how much of the subject line will be displayed by the email service provider
The subject lines are even shorter on mobile devices

Short attention span is just one reason for creating brief email subject lines. Another reason is that over 41% of emails are viewed on mobile devices. It is recommended to limit your subject lines to 60 characters.

5. Use Numbers in Subject Lines

When you use a specific number, such as a quantity or percentage, it makes your email subject line feel more important. A subject line can also be an introduction to a listicle. Numbers provide a clearer sense of what to expect from the content. According to surveys, adding a number to the subject line can boost open rates by up to 21%.

Using numbers or listicles is a best practice in content marketing. It can also refer to a price or discount. Numbers can easily help grab attention, as they stand out among letters. When using numbers, do not spell them out.

Besides, listicles are easy to read. Thus, using numbers makes your emails more clickable. Lists work perfectly for newsletters, emails containing blogs, and emails promoting products/services.

6. Maintain Clarity

Always create clear email subject lines that set the right expectations. It should help the email recipient instantly get an idea of what to expect in the email content. Avoid a subject line that is complicated, confusing, or vague.

Using unclear language can easily mislead or confuse the recipients. When you consistently maintain clarity and a clear relation between the subject and content, it will help build trust in the long term.

While using clickbait-based subject lines may increase your open rates temporarily, they can have a negative effect in the long term. Email marketing is based on trust and long-term relationship-building. Spammy and clickbait-based subject lines can potentially increase your unsubscribe rates.

Try to be descriptive and direct rather than being trendy. While seasonable taglines such as “amazing summer deals” and “great fall savings” are widely popular, they do not provide a specific hook. You can better mention the benefits of your promotions or draw attention to a specific deal.

If you don’t have a Google Ads account, click on ‘get started’
Provide info on your location and the services you offer

7. Showcase Your Brand Personality

Your subject lines should consistently follow your brand’s unique tone of voice. When it comes to effective communication, the tone used can have a big impact. Finding and implementing this tone consistently can help build a strong brand-customer relationship. It is important not to deviate from it.

The tone should be clear and align with your brand’s image. It should meet your target audiences’ expectations. The result is continual engagement and greater satisfaction.

8. Use Emojis Carefully

Emojis are commonly used in email subject lines. Firstly, it is fun. Secondly, it makes it easier to grab attention, especially in overcrowded inboxes. Avoid or limit the use of emojis in the following scenarios:

Your target audience dislikes or doesn’t care for emojis
There is no consistent rendering across platforms and devices
Emojis are not relevant to the topic or are hard to understand
Emojis having second meanings

Still, when used right emojis help keep the subject line concise. So, you should explore ways to integrate emojis into your subject lines while following these tips:

Use emojis to add visual appeal to your email subject lines
Do not use more than one emoji at a time
Emojis should be used to supplement words and not replace them

Make sure to run tests to ensure the emojis are rendered properly on different operating systems.

So, follow these tips when creating subject lines for your emails. It is recommended to be clear, concise, and consistent with the subject lines that you create. This can help build trust and long-lasting relationships with your audience. If you want professional email marketing services, contact Clear Imaging, Inc. team at 1(800) 380-6942. You can also write to us and we will get back to you at the earliest.