As a new teacherpreneur, it can be challenging to stand out in today’s digital marketing world. That’s why I’ve shared extensively about the importance of SEO to bring new users to your website and email marketing to consistently market to them once they’ve found you. Using attention-grabbing email subject lines in your email marketing is one way to make sure your subscribers stay engaged.
Your inbox is likely flooded with emails from companies all fighting for your attention, but some of the emails head straight to the trash. How do you decide which emails to open? You likely open emails from brands you love most, the ones that provide consistent value. But how do you decide which other emails to open? Likely they’re the ones with attention-grabbing email subject lines.
Why Are Email Subject Lines Important in Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a powerful tool teacherpreneurs can use to make the most profit compared to other forms of advertising. Despite its power, campaigns depend on open rates to be successful. You’ve likely heard the saying, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” This is 100% true when it comes to email subject lines; you’re one click away from opening or trashing at first glance.
An attention-grabbing subject line will:
- Pique interest and curiosity
- Incite urgency (i.e., limited time offer)
- Promises a value (i.e., this will help you do X)
Open Rates Based on Subject Lines
Subject lines that are both engaging and personalized have been shown to raise open rates by as much as 29.3%, according to this marketing study. If you’ve been struggling to increase open rates, personalizing your email subject lines could be a serious game changer.
Tips and Best Practices for Email Subject Lines
Fortunately, improving your email subject lines is pretty simple! Here are proven techniques to create engaging subject lines:
- The ideal length for subject lines is between 31 and 50 characters, so keep it short and sweet.
- Use concise and impactful words. Subject lines should pack a punch, but careful not to use spam-triggering words (free, win, or cash) until you’ve established solid open rates already.
- Avoid excessive punctuation, another commonly used spam tactic that sometimes gets flagged by spam or promotion folders.
- Trigger curiosity by giving your audience a teaser of why they should open it. For example, THEY won’t share this classroom management strategy, but I will!
- Some of the best subject lines will appeal to emotion. How can your subjects make a connection or trigger nostalgia?
If you’re looking for more examples and inspirations for writing email content, try these three must-send emails.
Connect With Your Audience in Two Steps
In order to create authentic and engaging emails, you need to deeply understand your audience. When writing your emails and subject lines, mirror something relatable to your audience. What experiences, concerns, pain points, or values do you share?
Step 1: Research and Analyze Your Target Audience
When researching and analyzing your audience, go beyond typical demographics. Really focus on behaviors, preferences, and problems. Dig into your data to see which lead magnets users subscribed to, which products they’ve purchased, and what types of emails they open most. You can also use link triggers, surveys, or feedback forms. If you’ve tried these in the past without success, consider giving a small incentive for completing the task (small coupon code, random giveaway, etc.).
Understanding your audiences’ professional challenges, personal goals, and content consumption habits can make a big difference in your email marketing. Having a well-informed approach is not just strategic, but also transformative for your business. Segmenting your email list is one way to dig into more personalized content.
Step 2: The Power of Personalizing Email Subject Lines
Personalizing subject lines can be as simple as adding a subscriber’s name or location to the subject lines. Think about it: When you read your name or location in the subject line of an email, it feels more like a personal message rather than an automated email from someone just trying to sell you something.
Adding this personal touch to the email taps into the innate human desire of being seen and acknowledged, which is something that’s often lost in the digital marketing space. This is one of the reasons why personalized subject lines result in much higher open rates and personalized email content results in higher revenues.
How to Create a Sense of Urgency in Email Marketing
Given the rapid pace of today’s digital culture, a well-executed sense of urgency can have a profound impact on someone opening your emails. Here’s how you can give your audience a sense of urgency as soon as they see your emails pop up in their inbox:
Techniques That Instill a Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO)
We’ve all heard of FOMO and no one likes opening an email too late and discovering they’ve missed a great deal. Be sure to highlight limited-time offers in the subject line so they can be opened at-a-glance.
- Limited time offers: ✨ Flash ✨ FREEBIE Inside! 📝
- Exclusive invitations: Exclusive invite (to ___) for you only.
- Low stock alerts: Only 3 (items) left in stock, NAME!
- Limited-edition products: I’ve made this (item) just for you, NAME
- Early bird specials: Early access (to___) just for you
- Countdown timers: Clock is ticking, 45 minutes until (item) is gone.
While FOMO can be a powerful tool, use it ethically. Overplaying it and using it in every campaign can lead to mistrust and even alienate your audience or lead to unsubscribes. Consumers are too busy for constant hype!
Test and Analyze Subject Lines for Success
After you’ve crafted email nurture sequences and engaging subject lines, it’s time to test.While using best practices gives you an important foundation, testing will help you refine your approach and see what your audience responds to the most based on data.
The Power of A/B Testing
No matter how catchy and engaging your subject line is, there’s always room for improvement (or sometimes even a completely different approach). Maybe your audience responds better to storytelling or straight to the point subject lines – this is where A/B testing comes in.
Here’s how to A/B test: Send out two variations of subject lines to different audience segments and see which one resonates more. Keep doing this over time, and you’ll start to notice a pattern in their preferences and the subtle details that make up that pattern. Many email marketing provides (like ConvertKit) allow you to do this automatically with each campaign. You can provide two subjects lines that will go out to a small portion of your list. After a little bit of time, ConvertKit will automatically select the best subject line and use that for the remaining subscribers.
Analyzing Open Rates, Click-Through Rates, and Conversions
When analyzing data, it can be overwhelming to look at statistics (unless math is your thing and even then, you need to know what each percentage means!).
The three most common data points of email marketing are:
- Open Rates: Studying how many of your subscribers actually clicked through to read your email is a good indicator of how engaging your subject lines were.
- Click-Through Rates (CTR): While open rates measure the initial interest, click-through rates measure how many people clicked on links within the email. CTRs show how relevant the content of the email itself was, rather than just the subject line’s effectiveness.
- Conversion: Conversion rate, or the percentage of visitors who took some sort of action (such as making a purchase, registering for a webinar, or making an appointment), is the final and most important parameter. This proves that your email campaigns as a whole are effective.
Monitoring these three parameters will give you a better idea of where you need to improve and how to fine-tune your email marketing strategies. Once you learn to tap into the data, understand it, and change your approach based on performance, you’ll have true success with your email marketing.
Email Subject Line Examples
Writing engaging subject lines is both an art and a science. The magic happens when you add your brand voice and personality to the best practices above. Here are a few more email subject line examples to help you tie it all together.
Time Sensitive Sale Email Examples
Most of us are familiar with TPT’s sitewide sales a few times a year. Because our customers subscribe to many different email lists, it’s important to help your emails stand out. Here are a few examples to help.
Subject Line: Don’t miss these 😍 BIG SAVINGS on decodable books 📚 to use all year!
Why it Works: This subject line works because it highlights the time-sensitive savings and tells them exactly what’s on sale. Anyone who is interested in decodable books now knows they can grab them on sale. The emojis help highlight key words—savings and what’s on sale.
Subject Line: Time to RUN, (Name)! 😱 90 minutes left to save 25% on my entire store!
Why it Works: This subject line showcases urgency and personalization. The subscriber’s name makes it more personal to catch their attention, while the RUN and emoji are eye-catching and reinforce time sensitivity.
New Product Launch Examples
New product launches are always exciting for both you and your audience. Many of your loyal subscribers will already have your existing offers that meet their needs, so a new product lunch is the perfect opportunity to see a boost in conversions.
Subject Line: [📥 NEW Game-Changing Classroom Tool: DELIVERED]
Why it Works: The term “game-changing” is meant to stimulate interest in the new tool, while the term “classroom tool” is broad enough to apply to a variety of issues without giving the exact content away, which means they’ll have to open the email to learn more. The brackets and emoji help catch the eye as subscribers scan through their email list.
Subject Line: ⚠️ Time To Enroll: This ✨ALL NEW ✨ SAT prep course is open!
Why it Works: The alert emoji immediately signals importance to your brain and the sparkles highlight that the email contents brand new content. The “Time To Enroll” phrase is a call to action (CTA) that tells readers exactly what to do. The entire subject line also reads as an invitation to join you for the opening of your new course.
New Informational Blog Post Examples
When you’ve put in a lot of time and effort into a blog post, you want as many people as possible to read it. This free checklist can help you improve your blog post reach, and so can email marketing!
Subject Line: 🔓Unlock Classroom Success: 3️⃣ (math, reading, management, etc.) Resources That Will Help
Why it Works: The phrase “Classroom Success” in the subject line pique curiosity and highlight the value you’re providing to your audience by offering three resources they can use for a specific subject area (and if you’re using email marketing segments, you know you’re sending the right subjects to the right subscribers). Numbers also perform particularly well in email subjects, likely because the content inside is usually easy to read/skim in numbered points. Again, emojis help break up the text.
Subject Line: ✅ Establish these yearlong routines NOW to ⏰ save time all year!
Why it Works: This subject line has it all – a sense of urgency, a call to action, the appeal of saving time, and emojis to draw attention to keywords.
Use These Tips To Write a Compelling Email Subject Line
Email marketing can be tricky to figure out, but these tips can help. Here’s a recap.
- Add personalization to your emails with their name or location.
- Be as descriptive and direct as possible. Run A/B tests on which types of email subject lines work best for each audience segment.
- Keep it short and sweet.
- Limit punctuation, especially when it comes to using a lot of exclamation marks.
- Utilize powerful methods such as urgency, exclusivity, and strong call to actions.
Email is one of the best ways to drive profits for your teacherpreneur business, which is why it’s crucial to understand email marketing best practices. Marketing is a continuous, ever-changing game, but reading these guides means that you’re on the way to crushing it! Be sure to subscribe below so you always receive an email when new guides are posted.
Looking for additional help with email marketing? I have more email resources here for you!
