A couple of days ago, I sent out an email with the subject line, “How is your vagal tone?”
It was a dumb subject line. I should have used “Agora’s new health blockbuster” instead.
I say this because that email did worse than average in terms of opens. And yes, I know that sales are a vagillion times more important than opens. But since I’m not selling anything with these emails at the moment, then even open rates are interesting to look at.
And that’s one thing I’ve noticed with email opens throughout 2019 — they tend to be consistently lower with bizarre headlines like “How is your vagal tone?” I’ve also noticed that pure curiosity subject lines underperform as well.
And yet, such subject lines are as common in marketing emails as broken ankles are at the Walmart entrance on Black Friday.
No surprise there — these kinds of subject lines are easy and lazy to write. But I think it’s time to change.
I’m personally throwing out pure curiosity subject lines and bizarro angles — RIP 2019.
In their place, it’s time come up with subject lines that are clearly of interest to people on the list. It’s not rocket surgery, but as my “vagal tone” email shows, it’s still easy to screw up.