10 Subject Line Elements That Cause Me To Delete Your Email
February 9th, 2011
I get a lot of email. I don’t mean a lot of email, I mean a LOT of email.
Part of it has to do with the fact that I have about a dozen email accounts, but right now I’d like to focus on one of them: the AOL account I’ve had since the early ’90s.
This is the catch-all account where I send all my subscriptions and newsletters and discussion group mailings. It’s the address I provide whenever I buy anything online. As a result, it’s where I get a lot of marketing-related email.
As I type this, there are 937 messages in this account’s inbox. That’s culled down from about 1,100 when I logged on this morning. How do I decide what to delete? I have several ways, but the main one is to search the subject lines for particular elements that tell me the email is worth deleting without reading.
Here’s my list of the top 10 things I search for when I’m trying to clean out my inbox:
1 — “%”
2 — “$”
3 — “!”
4 — “free”
5 — “Craig”
6 — “get”
7 — “offer”
8 — “save”
9 — “deal”
10 — “sale”
When I search for these elements in subject lines, 999 times out of 1,000 the email is a piece of junk I can delete without reading.
I don’t know how strongly my attitude is reflected in any given company’s mailing list of, say, 100,000 addresses. I do know this, though: In-my-face offers and fake “personalization” aren’t the things that make me interested in reading further.
Takeaway for marketers: I’m not saying you should never include these elements in your subject lines, but I am saying you should think about the rest of the messages in your recipients’ inboxes, not just yours. Which is yet another reason why A/B testing of subject lines is so important.