One of the best parts about helping so many clients with their content marketing is that we develop a built-in focus group.
I was recently looking at the open rates across all of our content/email marketing clients for 2013. As I was looking at the subject lines that garnered the most and least opens, something really stood out.
The subject lines that got the least opens (11-12 percent) contained words like candidate, employee, screening, temps — i.e., everything that relates to our client’s services.
Of the subject lines there got the most opens (16-19 percent), there was only one mention of the word employee. Here is a complete breakdown.
I will admit that I was a little shocked by this. Unfortunately, what it is saying is that your client’s recipients don’t necessarily want to read about your services. Yikes!
But before you panic, all is not lost. You can still present content that is relevant to your business, you just need to be a little creative.
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If we look at all of the highest open rates, almost all of them opens were ones where we tried to be more attention getting. For example:
“Another day, another crisis”
“Do you hear the whispers?”
“What’s dirtier a keyboard or a toilet?”
With all of the emails we get everyday it’s becoming harder and harder to stand out. We need to come up with subject lines like the ones above to help get the reader’s attention. Once you’ve gotten people to open your emails you’ve won a major battle against all of the other emails clogging up their inboxes. For example, I bet the title of this post got your attention. But if I had simply said “Top Subject Lines” would you have given it a second thought?
That said, you still need to provide great content. Think of creative ways that you can present your story, your services, and the benefits of working with your firm. But that’s another topic for another post. Until then, think about what gets your attention in your inbox and use those same tactics in your subject line writing.
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