Writing a subject line a hungry person will open
Your email is competing with every other thing in an inbox at five in the afternoon. The subject line has about one second to say something worth reading.
I once spent most of a morning arguing about whether a subject line should say "pizza" or "pie". The email went out that afternoon and did about as well as every other email that month. Nobody remembers which word won.
That is a lesson in itself. Most subject line debates are about small things. The big things are simpler and get ignored.
Say what it is
A pizza shop's customers are not reading your email for entertainment. They open it because it might help them decide what to eat. The subject line should tell them, plainly, what is inside.
"Large two topping, $12.99 tonight only" is not poetry. It is clear, it has a reason to act, and a hungry person understands it in a glance. "You won't believe what's cooking!" tells them nothing and sounds like every other brand in the inbox.
Put the useful part first
Phones cut subject lines short. On many screens you get thirty or forty characters before the rest disappears. Put the offer or the news at the start, not after a greeting or the shop name. The sender name already tells people who you are.
The preview text, the grey line under the subject on most phones, is the second half of the subject line. Use it. If you leave it blank, many email programs fill it with the first words of the email, which are often "View this email in your browser".
Write for the time it lands
An email that arrives at four in the afternoon can talk about tonight. An email that arrives at ten in the morning should talk about something people can plan for. Match the subject to the moment.
Test, but test properly
Most email tools let you send two subject lines to small groups and send the winner to everyone else. That is useful when the two versions are genuinely different. Testing "pizza" against "pie" teaches you very little. Testing a plain offer against a story about the new menu teaches you something about your customers.
Judge the test on orders, not opens. A clever subject line can win on opens and lose on sales, because it attracted the curious rather than the hungry.
A short checklist
- The offer or news in the first thirty characters.
- A preview line that adds something.
- No capital letters for emphasis, no rows of exclamation marks.
- Nothing promised in the subject that the email does not deliver.
Do those four things every time and you will be ahead of most of the inbox. The pizza or pie question can wait.
