Email marketing subject lines
Most savvy marketers are aware of the contribution that email marketing makes to the success of a digital strategy, but a common mistake that those who are less experienced often make is to focus on the body of the email and treat the title as an afterthought.
When you think about it, this make no sense. After all, the purpose of your email marketing subject lines are to entice readers to open your email. Indeed, according to statistics, 64% of email recipients will make a decision to open an email based on the subject line. Similarly, 33% of recipients will open an email because it has a catchy subject line.
That means your subject needs to have an awful lot of clout to get noticed and opened. The more eye-catching it is, or the more compelling the hook, the more likely it is to be a success. With that in mind, here are six tips on how to make the email marketing subject lines for your accountancy firm work harder for you.
- Test test test
Testing your email marketing subject lines gives you a better idea of what resonates with your particular audience. With each segment, try a couple of different subject lines to see which get the best open rate. With business customers, for example, you could try the two following subjects for Making Tax Digital related content:
- Is your business MTD-ready?
- 3 steps to ensure your business is ready for MTD
Typically you would only test two subject lines at once. These can be sent randomly to your chosen split of people – 50/50 or 40/60, depending on your preference. You can then monitor the impact on open rates and optimise for future emails.
- Personalise
There are a couple of ways you can make an email more personal. The first is by putting a name in the ‘sender’ field, rather than the company. If the email comes from Joe Bloggs rather than Bloggs & Co, it can seem more friendly. When considering email marketing for accounting firms, this may not necessarily be appropriate for emailing large organisations, but could be a really good tactic for emailing individuals.
The second way you can personalise emails is to put the recipient’s name into the subject line. Taking the example above, you might put, “Joe, is your business MTD ready?” With 88% of customers indicating that they are more likely to engage with an email that appears to be sent specifically to them, this is a tactic that can pay dividends with reasonably little effort.
- Create curiosity
By creating curiosity, you give your customers a small part of the story in a way that induces them to open your email to find out more. Think about subject lines that may have piqued your interest in the past and see if they can be adapted to your purpose.
For example, you might write, “Streamlining your accounts might be easier than you think” or “Could cloud accounting solve these common bookkeeping issues?” These subject lines leave something out, giving the recipient a compelling reason to click through and find out more.
- Keep it brief
While creating curiosity is good, you need to be mindful of the length of your subject line. To catch attention it needs to remain fairly snappy, and to ensure it’s displayed correctly in the recipient’s inbox, it’s advisable to keep the subject line below 60 characters in length. If your users tend to open emails on mobile devices, you may want to make the subject line even shorter – closer to 30 characters in length – so it displays properly in the inbox.
You should also avoid using too much punctuation (such as exclamation marks), and refrain from using caps, as these will make the email seem spammy and therefore reduce the likelihood of opens.
- Make use of preview text
Often, emails have preview text that appears after the subject line. This space is typically filled by copy from the email itself, and will be automated if you don’t customise it. To avoid missing an opportunity, ensure you put in tailored content that can give your subject line more context. You could, for example, ask a question or add in an extra teaser.
Your combined subject line and preview text might then look like this:
Is your business MTD-ready? 3 things you can do now to prepare.
3 steps to ensure your business is ready for MTD Get a head start on digital tax compliance.
- Experiment with stats
Including a statistic or number can help with click through rates, depending on your audience. Again, this is a tactic that’s worth split testing, but you could entice readers by giving them a statistic linked with a question.
You might put, for example, “Just 18% of businesses are MTD-ready. Are you one of them?” Or “87% of businesses have benefitted from cloud accounting”. Subject lines like these encourage the recipient to find out more, or spark their curiosity over whether they are keeping up with competitors.
How we can help with your email marketing
If you’re looking for help with outreach emails and email newsletters for accountants speak to the team at Whitefish Marketing today. We are a specialist marketing agency for accounting firms and are partnered with a GDPR compliant database warehouse, enabling us to supply you with data sources for email marketing outreach. Target specific groups, such as CIS contractors based in your county, or businesses with a turnover of £2 million or more, which are located within 20 miles of your postcode. The opportunities and selection filters are vast, so get in touch with us to find out how we can help your organisation grow.
