For marketers, the open rate is one of the top priorities when creating a campaign, as it is one of the best ways to see if your email strategy is working.

With so many emails sent out a day, specifically 2.4 billion emails sent out per second, how can you make sure that you grab the attention of your audience every time?

One easy way to do this is to make sure your subject lines are compelling and intriguing, so your customers will open your email and feel motivated to buy tickets to your next event.

Here are 3 key tips on how to improve your subject lines:

Tip 1: Keeping the subject line short & simple…

Since 50% of all emails are opened on mobile devices, it only shows roughly about 35-38 characters which is not a lot of text. Try to keep the text short, so they don’t have to spend so much time reading and can get straight to opening.

In the past 20 years, our attention spans have shrunk to only 8 seconds, meaning that you only have a small window of time to get your audience’s attention. Think about how many words you read in a day on your phone, on social media, on the street, in the supermarket and…on your email. Making the text short, sweet and simple can actually be more attractive nowadays than a lengthy descriptive text. Maybe save the descriptive text for the main content instead.

Tip 2: Change up the type of message you are giving…

Perhaps you have a signature style that you like to write in, but maybe you would like to try something different. Changing up the style of your subject lines can spice things up and spike your readers’ curiosity. Here are some styles if you haven’t tried them out already:

Simple headlines: Even just using one or two words for your subject lines can be effective like, ‘Amazing!’ or ‘Amazing Show!’ Or try directly giving straightforward information like, ‘The Show Is This Friday!’

Funny headlines: This is a nice way to get open rates, but sometimes thinking of a joke can be time consuming. When in doubt, you can always go for a dad joke: I’m so excited about the upcoming interactive theatre pun show. I do love a play on words.

Personalized headlines: If you have access to your data and are creating segmentations to target your audience better, you can easily create campaigns that are more personal. For example, if you create a segment for people within 10km of the venue, you can send them an email with the subject line ‘what’s on this weekend’, so they can easily check out what events are right around the corner.

If you would like to look further into other types, you can check them out here.

Tip 3: Emojis and Numbers

If you thought earlier about how many words we experience in a day, think about how many numbers we experience as well. According to The Scientist, we experience around a thousand numbers per hour! 16,000 numbers in a day. It seems like a lot right? Well our brains do not have to process numbers in the intense way that we do with words. This means that we are able to process numbers more easily than words – giving your brain a ‘rest’ each time it sees a number.

Numbers stick out, but also help the brain feel organized (we even put a number in our title for this post). Numbers can increase your clickthrough rate by 36% meaning a higher chance for your customers to engage with your content.

Symbols can also be a great way to catch people’s attention next to all these words and numbers and that symbol we are talking about is of course emojis! Emojis have at 56% increase in their open rates, even higher than numbers. Emojis help give your words a visual message and users have a positive attitude and a deeper level of identification. This is a great way to make your subject lines more fun and in return, making your emails more irresistible to open.

The aim

The goal here is to make your subject line refreshing and get your audience to open quickly so they can get straight to the content. We encourage you to try out new methods and change things up to see what works for your organization.