Email marketing is a great tool, but there’s very little wiggle room for making mistakes. In an instant you can do something that makes someone think, “This has no value to me,” and then they click that lovely little “unsubscribe” button.
This came to mind today when I received an email from an organization that I’m a fan of; their emails are all over the place and have lots of opportunity for improvement. I know the person running the show and previously offered up some tips (after asking if he/she would be interested in hearing them) on ways the email could be improved.
One of the tips had to do with their email subject line. In the past it has been horrifically long… and unfortunately it still is very long. I’m not going to share the subject line so the organization can remain anonymous, but the subject line for their latest email had 25 words, or 145 characters (with spaces).
The rules vary on subject length, but I prefer to keep them around seven to eight words max. There are two main reasons for doing so:
- Long subject lines can upset finicky spam filters
- The more words you include the higher your chances are of using keywords that trigger spam filters to kick your email down the wrong path (free, quote, sample, access, etc)
Email marketing can do great things for an organization, but the fundamentals simply can’t be ignored. I’ll be doing additional posts on this topic so stay tuned.
