Day Seven: There’s been plenty of research conducted about email subject lines, some good, some bad and some just plain silly. I always marvel at Mail Chimp’s list of worst performing email subject lines with Final reminder for complimentary entry to attend the West Freelands BCI Cluster Conference 2006 maintaining a comfortable lead for eight straight years.

Assuming you’re ultimately looking to drive traffic to your website or a key landing page somewhere, the email subject line is going to be a primary barrier to successful open rates, and your email’s content, the barrier to a click through. Considering you need to get past the subject line and past your copy just to get to the web page, let alone wanting the web visitor to take some form of action once they’ve landed, is nothing short of a tall order.

There’s no shortage of statistics – no more than six words, less than 130 characters, don’t use all caps and exclamation points, or the words Free, Help and Percent-Off. That’s all reasonable. However, what’s quite revealing is in a study conducted by Adestra, they determined that subject lines for B2B emails had a stronger open rate when they were 6-10 words in length, but a weaker click-through rate. This tells us that we should use a longer subject line when the email does not require the reader to take a click-through action.

But what’s missing in all of this research? Creativity and a default excuse. I’ve closed business from a three word subject line that I’ve used time and again. It’s not overwhelmingly creative but it does seems to be engaging. It Can’t Hurt. I’ve used this in business development to insurance companies, to manufacturers, to banks and to property management companies. In my text, I reference the amount of website work we’ve done in the industry, I reference the names of clients, even the recipient’s competitors. I might reference a few insights, as well as some other insights I’ll share with them when we meet. It works like a charm. And from what I hear in our initial meetings, they’ve fully scoured our website without having to bother with a click-through action. Give it a try and see if it works for you.