Subject lines that get opened and CTA advice
If you have a list of subscribers and you’re sending out daily, weekly or fortnightly emails that you think you could improve. Then you’re in the right place.
Email marketing is a powerful tool for your business. Its reach is an amazing way to engage with your audience. After all, they signed up to be on your list, so they want to hear from you. Your job is to now keep them engaged and buying from you.
The important bits of the email, however, are often overlooked or are not strong enough to be effective.
We’re talking about Subject lines and the Call to action (CTA).
These two things make up the start of your email and the end and are both equally important. You want a subject line that makes people open the email and then a strong CTA to close the deal and get the action you want.
So I’ve come up with 5 tips that will help you create awesome subject lines and CTA’s for your next campaign or your regular emails.
1. Set up a question in the reader’s mind and imply the answer will be in the email
This is a tactic that creates an open loop. You may have heard of these. Essentially you have created a question in the head of the reader where they absolutely must get the answer now to close the loop.
Some examples could be
- The £20 lawn care tip that saved my lawn and made it lush and green all year
- You won’t believe what happened to me today
- Did you see this on Insta?
- How to quit your job and live life on your terms
2. Try a personalised subject line
There’s a reason that Mailchimp, Hubspot and many others advise you to try this because it works. According to Campaign Monitor emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened than those without. Most CRMs will allow you to personalise a subject line with a customer's name by using merge tags.
But a word of warning DON’T OVERDO IT.
3. Create Urgency with your CTA’s
Urgency is a motivator. We are trying to get your audience to open and act now and not be put in the “I’ll do it another day pile”. I spoke about some urgency tips in my blog 3 Ways to Create Urgency and boost sales for your business. But here are some more to get stuck into.
- You could use a countdown timer to the end of an offer and add language like “spaces/they are selling fast.
- Another tactic is to let your audience know when a price increase is coming. That way you can reiterate that it won’t be seen at this price again. Better grab it now.
4. Use action words on your CTA’s.
The aim is to make it specific. If you are in E-commerce then “Buy Now”, or “Order yours here”.
SaaS business? Try “Download now” and “Get started”.
These types of CTA’s are simple and tell your customer exactly what they need to do to click and get the offer you have emailed them about.
5. Test Test Test
I feel a bit like a broken record here but you can’t expect to get it right the first time. Even if you do, trying new things to see how they work is smart. So my final tip is to A/B test your subject lines and CTA’s in your emails and optimise your results.
