Subject lines I: Length
Dec 21, 2008 Email Marketing
Creating a subject line is like creating a work of art.
While there are some guidelines a budding artist can follow, there is no “art creation” template that guarantees success. Painting by numbers produces no masterpieces.
So it is with subject lines: there is no simple template to follow to ensure higher responses to your emails. Which is a shame, because what you put in the subject is critical to email marketing success.
What you can do is develop an understanding of the factors that contribute to a winning subject line, and then draw them together to develop “best guess” subjects to try out in practice.
So what are these factors?
Today sees the first of a couple of posts which answer that question. And we begin with perhaps the biggest question: how long should my subject line be?
Subject line length
“Small is beautiful” was always the mantra of subject line length. MailChimp, for example, reviewed a host of campaign stats and found that:
“Shorter subject lines seemed to work better than long subject lines”
…an idea supported by data collected by another ESP, MailerMailer.
But other surveys draw different conclusions.
Emma (also an ESP) checked their own newsletter stats, for example, and discovered:
“…our longer subject line boasted both higher open and clickthrough rates than its shorter counterpart”
Then Alchemy Worx produced data which appeared to show that longer subject lines were outperforming shorter ones.
Most recently, dialog-Mail released an open rate study confirming the idea that shorter is better, but which also suggested that, for example, nine word subjects performed comparably to three-word ones.
So what’s going on?
The secret lies in an analysis of the Alchemy Worx report: there is no magic subject line length.
Our desire to simplify led us to seek the ultimate answer to life, the universe and emails: how many characters should the ideal subject line contain (42?)
But subject line length should not be driven by some arbitrary word or character limit.
The effectiveness of the subject line depends on many factors. If you have length as your top priority, you risk compromising on other success factors driving response.
So we might say shorter is generally sweeter. [Not least because many email clients limit the number of characters they will display in the subject line field on the webmail interface, mobile email device or PC.]
But it is still just one factor.
And there will be many occasions when a subject line must be “longer” to contain the words and elements needed to drive a particular response from a particular kind of email to a particular email audience.
Which explains why studies often come up with different results on optimal lengths.
For example, a short headline is often enough to communicate the value of opening a promotional email featuring a single offer.
But informational newsletters might need longer subjects to adequately communicate the value of opening.
So the new length mantra is this:
Use as few characters as you can while still allowing the subject line to do its job
Or put alternatively:
Don’t sacrifice on message just for the sake of keeping the subject line short
But what are these other factors, words and elements that impact your subject line length and success? The story continues in Part II…
More on subject lines | Tags: email marketing, subject lines
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