Designing a beautiful email is great, but a good subject line is even better!

Since your recipients' inbox is a highly competitive environment, the subject line needs to be written with particular care. According to a study by the DMA France, on average in 2022, French individuals received around 7.33 e-mails per day from companies. So how do you stand out from the crowd? 

The subject line is an essential element of your campaign. It plays a decisive role in whether or not your email is opened, just like the sender's name and the preview text, and an unopened email isn't worth much .

The idea is to maximize the opening rate with a relevant subject line that captures attention and convinces the recipient of the quality of the content. There are a number of strategies you can use to achieve this, including: creating a sense of urgency, arousing curiosity, adopting a humorous tone, taking advantage of current events and the major events of the year...

In this article, we'd like to introduce you to some of the email subjects recently received in the inboxes of Arenametrix employees, which caught our attention and which we'd like to read more often.

1. Those that create urgency

The sense of urgency and the FOMO or fear of missing out (fear of missing out on something, a good deal, a unique experience, an unforgettable event...) are levers you can play on to make your contacts want to open the email. This sense of urgency can be provoked by recalling the temporality of the event or an approaching deadline.

• Nigloland Nigloland : "J-7 before the opening !"

• Théâtre Saint-Gervais: "It's already tomorrow - Festival de la jeune création" 

• Red Star FC: "Red loyalist, we've got a special offer only for you at Bauer".

2. Those who bounce off the news

Bouncing on current events, seasonality or a major event of the year makes the object more relevant to contacts.

• Monnaie de Paris "Paris 2024: complete your collection with four new sports".

• File7:"🔔 Happy Easter : our latest news before you devour your chocolates!"

• Le Five: "Jerome, what's on tap for Valentine's Day?"

3. Those who arouse curiosity

Like a movie trailer, a mysterious, intriguing object makes recipients want to know more! And what can you do to find out more, to understand and answer the questions that come flooding in? Open the e-mail!

• MUCEM "This week, we go inside the museum guards".

• Le Chabada: "Johan, Metal and pedals "

• ESTAC - Troyes: "Workout By ESTAC"

4. Those who opt for a quirky tone

Humor is also an effective way to stand out from the dozens of other emails in your contacts' inbox, by giving your structure personality. But be careful to adapt your humor to your audience.

• TOM Travel "Journey to the center of tech"

• Festival La Semo: "Sorry about Sunday night!

• Le Centquatre-Paris "May Forsythe be with you!"

5. Those who use personalization... and rightly so !

According to a study by Experian, e-mails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. Personalization allows you to appeal to your recipient, who is sure to find something in it for them, and to humanize the relationship you have with them.

• Jazz à Saint-Germain-des-Prés Festival Paris: "Ambre, take advantage of the Full Festival Pass!"

• Paris Basketball: "Jérôme, a jersey with your name on it - it's possible!"

BONUS: Our tips for effective objects

Here are our 8 best practices for an object that will increase your open rate :

• Be clear and concise

A subject that is too long will be truncated by the messaging system: we generally recommend not exceeding 40/45 characters.

• Place important information at the beginning of the object

If the main information is placed at the beginning, it's more likely to be read.

• Do not repeat the sender's name

Thanks to the sender's name, the recipient knows who's writing to him/her, so why repeat it in the subject line and waste some of the object's precious characters.

• Don't use generic names like "newsletter", "mail" or "September".

The recipient knows it's an e-mail, a newsletter, so use the characters wisely and talk about the content of the e-mail instead.

• Use emojis without abusing them

Emojis make your e-mails stand out from the crowd.

• Make people want to open the email

Thanks to the different strategies detailed above, you can make your e-mails more attractive.

• Watch out for spam words

Spam words (promotions / free / lottery...) are words considered suspicious by e-mail providers. If one of these words appears in the subject line of an e-mail, there's a good chance it will land directly in the spam folder.
Refer to lists such as Plezi.

• DON'T OVERUSE CAPITAL LETTERS

Unpleasant, isn't it? In addition to being perceived negatively by readers, an object that abuses capital letters could be classified as spam.

Given the number of emails your recipients receive every day, it's essential to think carefully about your email subject lines if you want to stand out from the crowd.
Take inspiration from the examples presented here, and let your imagination run wild as you design subject lines that make your recipients want to open your emails.

To take your object design a step further and maximize your open rates, we recommend A/B testing. This feature lets you define two objects, send the test objects to a pre-defined proportion of your mailing list, and then send the version with the best open rate to the rest of the list. We recommend that you use this feature for campaigns targeting at least 5000 contacts, to ensure that the tests are conclusive. Now it's your turn to create objects and test different combinations.