What’s Your Open Rate? How to Write Compelling Intros for Mobile Email Marketing

It’s surprising, then, that a marketing channel nearly forty years old is still one of the most relevant for digital marketing. Ever-increasing mobile device use has helped keep email marketing relevant, too. One study suggests 20-75% of your email opens will be on mobile. More brands sending emails means more competition for your audience’s limited attention span. Here’s how to write subject lines and preview text that make your email more likely to get read. Subject Lines – Every Character Counts Counting up characters for email subject lines wouldn’t have made sense in a desktop-only world. If you’re personalizing your emails (and you should be), make sure the preview text will demonstrate that personalization. And I open every single one and click through. Mysterious subject line, compelling preview text, and an interactive element, delivered to my inbox daily. Keep your subject lines short and hyper-relevant, make your case in the preview text, and you can earn a tap on your message.

How many of your current marketing tactics are over five years old? Marketing is a fast-paced profession; even if you’re still using the same channels, odds are your strategy has changed. How about ten years old? Twenty? Thirty?

It’s surprising, then, that a marketing channel nearly forty years old is still one of the most relevant for digital marketing. Email marketing has been a steadily effective channel for decades, and advances in technology only make it easier to track, personalize, and optimize your campaigns.

Ever-increasing mobile device use has helped keep email marketing relevant, too. One study suggests 20-75% of your email opens will be on mobile. The younger your target audience, the more likely they are to use their phone as a primary email-reading device. Combine a self-selected audience with new ways to deliver the content they opted into, and it’s easy to see why email remains popular. How popular? A recent study from Salesforce found that email marketing has grown 83% in the last two years, across B2B and B2C.

However, the more valuable a marketing channel is, the more crowded it will become. More brands sending emails means more competition for your audience’s limited attention span.

Your email has to do more than provide value—it has to compel a click within a very limited character count. Here’s how to write subject lines and preview text that make your email more likely to get read.

Subject Lines – Every Character Counts

Counting up characters for email subject lines wouldn’t have made sense in a desktop-only world. There’s a virtual acre of screen real estate for your beautiful subject line to sprawl across. On mobile, though, there’s precious little space to make your case.

The exact character count varies by device, and whether it’s held in portrait or landscape mode. You could have as little as 33 characters – or about a quarter of a tweet.

You don’t have to completely limit your subject line to that short, of course. Just put your most persuasive language at the beginning. Which of the following truncated subject lines is more enticing?