Source: By Mark Brownlow, Email Marketing Reports
A recent post suggested space limitations in email and webmail interfaces might leave your subject line looking a little odd.
But this isn’t just about your subject line causing a wry smile or a little embarrassment when a word gets cut off in an inconvenient place. There’s more to it than that.
Here are three more “subject line traps” spotted in real emails.
1. Subject lines may end up shorter than you think
Typical subject line advice talks about keeping subject lines under 50 characters. It’s not really total length that’s important, but what you put at the front.
You’re probably familiar with the idea of frontloading, where the words likely to have the biggest impact on response are put as close to the start of your subject line as possible.
Our typical 50 character threshold for these hotwords may not be enough, though. My Yahoo! Mail inbox, for example, has just 27 characters displayed.
A little laxity can see frontloading defeated.
This retail promotion has a short, 50 character subject line:
Hit it out of the park with iPad this Father’s Day
But any display up to and including 31 characters fails to show the subject line’s hotword: iPad.
Hit it out of the park with iP
Perhaps, then, frontloading should mean what it says…hotwords right at the front, not just close to the front.
2. Beware generic beginnings
There are some obvious hotwords you might want to put right at the front of your subject line. Like “Memorial Day Sale”. You can’t really go wrong there.
These “generic” hotwords look fine in isolation and in theory, but not when placed alongside competitors using the same approach. Especially where shorter subject line displays cut off the subsequent copy that might distinguish your message.
Consider this inbox:
Memorial Day Stars & Savings – Up to 75% Off
Memorial Day Sale Preview + Save With a $10 Coupon
Memorial Day Weekend Sale — $15 Off Purchases of $150 or More!
Memorial Weekend Blowout – 20% Off Every Order!
Then one that truncates subject lines to 28 characters:
Memorial Day Stars & Savings
Memorial Day Sale Preview +
Memorial Day Weekend Sale –
Memorial Weekend Blowout – 2
There is nothing to make any one message stand out. Fortunately, no inbox is likely to look quite like that, though the danger is there as people make growing use of dedicated email accounts just for promotional email.
Here are some more subject lines:
MEMORIAL DAY SALE: 20% OFF Your Entire Order
73% SAVINGS Memorial Weekend Sale…Going on Now
PETCO Memorial Day Sale! Save Up To 40% + FREE Shipping!
And with the same 28 character cutoff:
MEMORIAL DAY SALE: 20% OFF Y
73% SAVINGS Memorial Weekend
PETCO Memorial Day Sale! Sav
All do a better job of standing out from the competition as subject lines are truncated. (See the Retail Email Blog for retail subject line showcases).
3. Take care with conditioners
Conditioners are those little extra words or numbers that change the meaning of the words that precede them. There is an important difference between “50% off Ice Age” and “50% off Ice Age 3″.
The short subject display issue outlined above can lead to problems, if those “conditioners” are critical. Consider:
Make your neighbors green with envy – save on patio, lawn & garden?
At a 25-26 character display, it looks like this:
“Make your neighbors green”
The play on words is lost, since “with envy” is gone. In fact, the meaning of the subject line changes completely, since we might assume it was an email about making your neighbors more environmentally aware.
Emails promoting a specific product can suffer equally. Take:
Amazon.com recommends “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw” and more
This is the third in the “Wimpy Kid” series (which my kids loved BTW).
A potential problem here is that any display up to 45 characters doesn’t reveal that critical piece of information. 43 character displays show, for example:
Amazon.com recommends “Diary of a Wimpy Kid
It’s likely I’ve already got the first in the series (that’s why I got the recommendation), so I may completely overlook the email, thinking it’s promoting something I already own.
These problems are not easy to solve. Nor are they necessarily huge in the big scheme of things. But Amazon might test, for example:
Amazon.com recommends new “Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw”
Awareness counts
None of the above should override your basic subject line priorities. But once you’re aware of potential issues with truncation, then you can tweak and test appropriately. Testing, of course, is the only way to be sure of the subject line words and approach that work best for you and your audience.
And sometimes, frankly, you just have to smile:
Get up to 70% off children’s fashion
Get up to 70% off children (at 26 characters)