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7 fixes for terrible subject lines
October 14, 2009

Article Highlights:

  • Personalization in subject lines can cause problems in several ways
  • Make your call-to-action clear, and let readers know if an offer will expire soon
  • Funky punctuation and cryptic language is not clever -- it's annoying

Next In Focus

Email's prime real estate

Think fast: How much time did you spend on the subject line of your last email campaign message? This critical element too often is the last thing you consider before hitting "send." Yet, it's the first thing your recipients see in the inbox.

Sending an email message with a lackluster subject line is like building a house without a front door. Maybe your recipients will walk around the house to find a back door, or try to crawl through a window. More likely, they'll just shrug and walk away.

Social networking puts the heat on the inbox
The competition for your readers' attention is fierce, and your subject headline is prime real estate. Besides personal email, opt-in messages, and the usual spam, every social network consumers belong to sends email notifications -- Facebook wall notes, Twitter follows, and LinkedIn invites, for example.

These emails probably have become your main competition, which means your subject lines have to work even harder now to get your customers' attention.

In this article, we'll take a look at seven of the most common blunders marketers make when crafting their subject lines, as well as how to fix them. But first, let's look at a few general subject-line best practices.


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