300+ Email Subject Lines & Best Practices

Table of Contents

Why is Email Subject Line Important?
How Long Should My Email Subject Line Be?
Best Practices For Email Subject Lines
How To Add Emojis To Email Subject Lines?
300+ Email Subject Lines
All’s well that starts well!

Emails are indispensable marketing tools. And therefore, email marketing is anything but dead. It gives you the upper hand to reach out to your target audience segment directly albeit with the right tools, techniques, and most importantly – email subject lines.

Why is Email Subject Line Important?

The first thing that recipients view when they receive an email in their inbox is the subject line and pretext header. What happens thereafter is interesting:

64% of recipients open emails due to their subject lines (Barilliance, 2021)
69% of recipients tag emails as spam soon after seeing their subject line (Invesp, 2021)

As you can see, Catchy email subject lines are one of the most critical parts of emails and well-constructed email subject lines make your readers click on the email, thereby increasing the email open rates. Even if your campaign is designed to perfection, the efforts are all futile without getting the open rates.

How Long Should My Email Subject Line Be?

According to a study from Marketo, 41 characters, or 7 words, seems to be a sweet spot for email subject line length. So, ideally, you should keep the subject line no more than 7-8 words or 35-41 characters. Remember, you’ll also be including a pre-text header along with it. So both of them should be visible perfectly, especially on smaller devices.

Pro tip: Keep the CTAs at the beginning of the subject lines.

Having said that, do you want to know what the best practices for writing attention-grabbing subject lines are? We got you covered via the following pointers.

Best Practices For Email Subject Lines

The Best Practices to Craft Best Email Subject Lines_Blog Banner

Don’t ignore pre text header

The importance of preview text can’t be ignored. They are essential real estate, which give readers a sneak peek into the email. When this text is not defined, the email client will tend to pick the first sentence of the email copy by default.

This can be disastrous, to say the least!

This is why you need to focus equally on the pre text. And go for testing to see how it appears with the subject line.

Personalization is the name of the game.

Never miss the bus on this one – personalization in subject lines must be the mainstay of any email you send out.

34% of marketers in the UK and the US are reported to employ email subject line personalization (Adobe, 2020)
Open rates shoot up by an enormous 50% with personalized email subject lines (Zippia)
Multi-channel retailers experience 37% higher unique email open rates for personalized subject lines than non-personalized ones (Experian)

Personalization of the subject lines can be as simple as using your subscriber’s first name. You’ll see this in the examples of the email subject line templates section.

If you’ve some customer data ready at your disposal, then you can even go a step ahead and personalize the subject line (and the body copy). For instance, you can use information like:

Recent purchase history
Shopping cart abandonment
Wish listed products
Frequency of purchase
Sync online vs. offline behavior
Demographics

Keep them short, crisp, and to the point.

Because your subscribers/readers are going to view the emails on different devices and via different applications, the number of characters that they are going to see within the subject line is going to vary.

Cramming too many words in the subject line will make it verbose. No one wants to really see a long, never-ending string of text in their already overflooded inboxes.

The solution?

Cut down any unnecessary jargon, words, and information. Just stick to the basics and focus on grabbing their attention within seconds.

Leverage the beauty of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)

Offer people something in limited edition, and they’ll flock in hordes to buy them. This simple human behavior goes by the term – FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out. It propels them to act quickly.

So why not use it across your email subject lines?

Give your target audience a sense of urgency. Be it promoting a huge discount only during Black Friday or reminding them of quickly depleting stocks of their favorite products.

Communicating these ‘urgent’ messages by cleverly tweaking your subject lines (using words like attention, hurry, important, etc.) can do wonders in boosting the open rates.

However, beware of not overdoing anything to trigger spam filters. For instance, refrain from using too many shouty CAPS, emojis, or exclamation marks.

Make them curious

“Get flat 50% off on our inaugural products.”

“An offer you can’t refuse!”

Which of these two subject lines will make you open the email? We all know the answer. And there’s a valid reason behind this. Our attention span is less than that of goldfish. That’s all the more reason to hook your readers or subscribers at the first glance itself.

Give them a sneak peek of what they can potentially find in the email. There are many ways to do so.

Create a hype around a new product
Unveiling a new product service
Ask questions/make it conversational
Shock them with an insane fact/statistic

All in all, keep their interests piqued.

Converse with the recipients

By now, you already know the importance of the warmth that a friendly, conversational tone of voice brings to email subject lines. Ergo, the recipients of your email will pay more attention when they’re the ones being talked to directly.

Write them as if you were to write to a friend or a family member. Give sufficient context and make it relevant for them.

Never overdo emojis

Using emojis is a common practice nowadays and it’s a sure shot way to grab the attention of the readers/subscribers. Sample these statistics:

56% of businesses that use emojis in the subject lines of their emails enjoy increased open rates (Zippia)
Emoji-rich email subject lines tend to be opened 8% more likely to be opened than those without any (MailMunch)

How To Add Emojis To Email Subject Lines?

How To Add Emojis To Email Subject Lines

While there are several ways to include emojis in the subject line, here are some points to remember:

Never use more than three emojis
Fit the context of the email and the brand
Replace words in subject line
Motivate users to take actions urgently
Convey an emotion

Remember, stuffing one too many emojis in the subject lines as it may adversely impact the open rates. It is the same case as using way too many exclamation marks and question marks. Let’s not forget the fact that the emoji appearances will appear differently based on various factors from the browsers to devices used to view the emails.

At the end of the day, there should not be anything left to guesswork with emojis. Period.

Never send any email without A/B testing – Send different variations of your email campaign to your target audience and you’ll be able to figure out which one generates the best results. This includes checking the campaigns with multiple subject line variations and seeing which ones generate more open rates.
Try out different tools – There are several tools that can be used to create awe-inspiring email subject lines. Here’s what we suggest:
Test Subject by Zurb
Spam Check by Postmark
Send Check It
Email Subject Line Tester by CoSchedule
Mizy by Automizy
Anyword.io
Email Subject Line Grader by Net Atlantic
SubjectLine.com
The Omnisend Email Subject Line Tester
ActiveCampaign
Keep a list of words handy to use – There are several words that have an impact on the audience and help increase the email open rates. We’ve quickly compiled a list of 100 such words for you:

All said and done, it’s time to get into some action.