Yesterday evening, I got an odd email from a reader. The subject line read:
“About your email subject lines”
There was nothing in the body of the email. There was just an attached file, “7 Tested and Proven Email Subject Lines that Get Your Emails Opened.” Among them:
1. How to survive _____
2. The biggest mistake _____ make
3. The fastest way to ______
I have this Chateau Heartiste policy of keeping my replies to readers no longer than what the reader wrote me. And since this reader didn’t even include a hello, I couldn’t, according to my policy, reply to ask him why he was sending me this guide to subject lines.
Was he displeased with my subject lines in general?
Was he impressed with my subject line yesterday? Did he think it fit one of these molds in some way?
I guess I’ll never know.
But since this reader did send me tested and proven subject line ideas, I squeezed a bunch of them into my subject line today.
After all, why not? I don’t think it will make a molehill of difference. Here’s a story on that matter:
Last year, I wrote an email with the subject line, “More real than real.” That email was about some slightly esoteric stuff. I purposefully didn’t want a DR-style subject line for it, one that might attract the wrong kind of attention.
A bunch of people wrote in response to that email to tell me how much they liked the story and the lesson I was sharing.
I also got a response from a smart and successful marketer. He warned me that he almost missed my email, which he thought was valuable once he read it, because my subject line didn’t catch his eye at all. He even rewrote my subject line to show me how it’s done.
And then, the next week, he wrote in with a similar message, again pointing out that my subject line is suboptimal and that he almost missed another valuable email from me. As far as I can tell, he continues to read my emails to this day.
I am not pointing fingers or making fun of anybody. I’m just pointing a finger at something obvious:
A lot of standard copywriting wisdom, which was extracted from cold-traffic tests, isn’t particularly relevant to warm daily emails, which people mainly open because they’ve learned that you have something fun or interesting to say. In warm emails, the “headline” is really your name, and not your subject line.
Maybe you say I can be cavalier about this, because I still don’t sell regularly in this email newsletter, and I certainly don’t A/B test my subject lines here.
Fine.
But I have been in situations where I was actively selling in email, and where I was actively testing. I’ve managed two 70,000-person email lists, which were made up of buyers, and which produced millions of dollars of sales, thanks to emails I wrote. And yes, thanks to subject lines I wrote.
And you know what?
I once ran a little test to find out how our email open rates influenced our sales.
Result?
Experts were shocked. Literally. I mean, I, an email marketing expert, was shocked.
And that’s why I want to warn you about the biggest mistake that email marketers make when it comes to subject lines. And that’s to follow “Tested and proven subject lines that get your emails OPENED.” If you want to read the real secret of why this is a big problem, here’s the fastest way to do that:
https://bejakovic.com/why-ecommerce-list-owners-should-beware-high-open-rates/