A reader writes in and asks:
A lot of your outreach email subject lines in The Outreach Blueprint use “YOUR NAME from COMPANY NAME”… why do you find a subject line like that works better than something more informative about the actual email?
— Stephanie C.
Stephanie asks a wonderful question. (Thank you everyone who has written in with great questions recently! Keep them coming!)
I’ve found that “First Name from Company Name” is a good fall-back, standard subject to use. But Stephanie is right in that it isn’t always the most effective — and it actually goes against one of my rules of being you-focused (read more here) when writing emails.
I think a more informative, entertaining, or curiosity-creating subject line works better — but to master that, we get deep into what makes a subject line work:
- It has a singular job: get someone to open the email
- It needs to be coherent and resonant with the content of the email. (I could send an email “Is your [family member] okay?” and it may get a SUPER HIGH open rate, but if the content isn’t resonant with that subject line, performance will decrease. And that’d be a horrible, terrible subject line to use!)
- It needs to feed into the opening line of the email, almost like how a headline feeds into the next line of text in a sales page
- It needs to, ideally, speak to the pain, problem, trigger, or desired outcome the recipient is looking for (qualifying them in or out, depending on if they connect with the subject line)
- It shouldn’t be a simple yes/no question, most of the time, because we don’t want someone to be able to say “NOPE!” to the subject and then not even read the email (similar rule for headlines)
So, when it comes to writing a subject line, more informative or entertaining does work better. But one could (and one probably should…) write a small book on crafting email subject lines.
When you read The Outreach Blueprint, my goal is to help you go from “0” to “I sent my first outreach email in my campaign!” in as little time as possible.
To help you achieve that goal with a singular focus, there’s a ton more about outreach and writing emails that got left out of the book: because it isn’t essential for you to get started.
In The Outreach Blueprint, I share easy-to-use “stock” subject lines that perform well in my testing.
And those subject lines help people who are sending their first outreach campaign or optimizing their existing campaigns have a swipe file to use.
To make it easy to get started, you skip over writing subject lines and instead focus on regularly sending outreach emails. The outcome you’re aiming for is “Get started sending your Outreach Emails!”
Stephanie is right — there are better options for subject lines. And to figure that out, it often comes down to testing and/or using software that gives you analytics for your campaign, so you can make data-driven decisions based on your outreach:
- What subject lines get the most opens?
- What subject lines get the most replies?
Sometimes a subject line gets fewer opens, but more replies because it hits home with the right market segment — and sometimes people aren’t emailing large enough lists to be able to effectively test that.
More informative or more entertaining subject lines can and often do perform better in testing.
But writing a good subject line can often be more challenging than writing your first outreach email.
So in The Outreach Blueprint, we skip the whole hard part of writing subject lines to get you sending your first outreach emails. And from there, once you’re comfortable with outreach, then we start exploring advanced systems, strategies, and tactics.
But it all starts with sending your first outreach emails.
Excelsior!