Tuesday, February 14, 2017 | Dave Kopf
IN EMAIL MARKETING, your success rides on your subject line. You must write subject lines that practically grab your recipients by the shirt collar and force them to click open the message and read.
That’s no easy feat, given how much competition you have for each of your recipient’s inbox. Think of it: for every single inbox, you’re trying to rise above a sea of other marketing emails, messages from mom and dad, work-related diatribes, racing and AMA emails, and everything else. You have your work cut out for you when it comes to writing a subject line that stands out from the crowd, gets users to open, and prompts them to click through to the site you specify.
You don’t have much room. Users of desktop email software and webmail clients typically size their inboxes so that roughly 40 to 50 characters of subject line, including spaces, appear. Moreover, on an smartphone mail app, the figure is more like 25 to 30 characters, including spaces. And given that 66 percent of all U.S. email traffic is opened and read on smartphones or tablets, according to MovableInk, you want to conform to that length.