{"id":41,"date":"2009-01-15T13:35:06","date_gmt":"2009-01-15T19:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/?p=41"},"modified":"2009-01-15T17:03:21","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T23:03:21","slug":"41","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/insights\/41\/","title":{"rendered":"Considering Email Subject Line Length"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I was in high school, our teacher\u00c2\u00a0gave us an assignment to write a speech on a single\u00c2\u00a03&#215;5 note card.\u00c2\u00a0 Even writing real small, it forced us to\u00c2\u00a0focus on\u00c2\u00a0the most important content and think about each and every word.\u00c2\u00a0 A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.epsilon.com\/emailsubjectline\" target=\"_blank\">recent study by Epsilon on subject lines<\/a> reminds\u00c2\u00a0us to do the same with email copy.<\/p>\n<p>Epsilon recently released the results of\u00c2\u00a0a study\u00c2\u00a0on subject line length which supports the generally held notion that shorter subject lines perform\u00c2\u00a0better (although the correlation may not be as strong as\u00c2\u00a0believed).\u00c2\u00a0 Shorter subject lines often\u00c2\u00a0do better for technical reasons\u00c2\u00a0as many email clients show fewer than 50 characters.\u00c2\u00a0 According to Epsilon, 57% of U.S. email recipients see only the first 38 to 47 characters of a subject line when making the decision to open an email.<\/p>\n<p>However, as the Epsilon report notes, the focus on the\u00c2\u00a0subject line length itself can\u00c2\u00a0camouflage two critical factors for success:\u00c2\u00a0 word choice and word placement.\u00c2\u00a0 Given the variety of email clients and continued growth of people reading email on mobile devices, the number of characters of a subject line that is visible\u00c2\u00a0could be 25 characters or 65.\u00c2\u00a0 That is why it is\u00c2\u00a0key to place the most important part of your message at the beginning of the subject line and carefully consider each and every word.<\/p>\n<p>Now that doesn&#8217;t mean you should never use longer subject lines.\u00c2\u00a0 There are many situations\u00c2\u00a0in which\u00c2\u00a0a longer subject line is warranted and will perform better (the report provides an example).\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0As such, it is important to continually test\u00c2\u00a0elements\u00c2\u00a0like placement\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0(e.g. Ends Today: 10% Off vs. 10% Off Through Friday),\u00c2\u00a0word selection\u00c2\u00a0(e.g. Ends Today vs. Last Chance), inclusion of your brand,\u00c2\u00a0and mentioning specific savings instead of a more general reference (10% off vs. Sale).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I was in high school, our teacher\u00c2\u00a0gave us an assignment to write a speech on a single\u00c2\u00a03&#215;5 note card.\u00c2\u00a0 Even writing real small, it forced us to\u00c2\u00a0focus on\u00c2\u00a0the most important content and think about each and every word.\u00c2\u00a0 A recent study by Epsilon on subject lines reminds\u00c2\u00a0us to do the same with email copy. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-email-marketing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaydigital.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}