Introduction
Are you trying to find the best way to write emails to your prospects so that you can get their attention and convert them to your students? By using the perfect subject line, your domain and your company will stay off the spam list. You’re going to get more people to read and you’ll have less unsubscribes. Also, when you do send offers and promotions, more people are going to check them out.
Hey, are you struggling with getting your emails delivered and open? In this lesson, we’re going to learn all about email subject line best practices. We’re going to learn what is it? Why do you want to use it?
We’re going to go into how to guide so that you can have better open strategies. We’re going to review the benefits, then we’ll go into an example, and finally we’ll summarize all our best tips.
😰 Here are some of the challenges course creators can face when they don’t use proper email subject lines:
- You may find that your emails end up in spam folders
- The emails may not be actionable
- You may not convert your readers to students
- Your topic may not be relevant to the receiver
- You may not learn to personalize your emails to each receiver
What Is It?
What Is It?
They are those interesting words we write in our subject line so that recipients open and read emails. This is because you don’t want them to delete your emails immediately. You want a subject line that’s appropriate.
Why Use It?
Well, this is going to increase the number of people that actually open and read your emails. First of all, they’re not deleting it, then they scan it, and they might not save it or filter it. They’re going to open it, scan it, and then read it. Ideally, your messages are getting through.
Your messages could be tips, creative tips for your student population, clients, coaching students. whatever it is, but those messages are getting through. With that, some of that is a lot of giving that you’re doing, You’re giving, and then every once in a while you ask for something.
Maybe you might ask for them to join your course or to take your coaching program or join your community, but you want them to at least see that offer. That’s the whole thing about the email. If they immediately deleted you or you got flagged as spam or they don’t know you, they don’t recognize you then yeah that’s what we have to fix.
You got to at least get them to look at your stuff and then you can deliver value and potentially, try to sell something.
How-to Guide
So let’s get into how to guide.
Better Open Rate Strategies:
First, I want to go into strategies to get better open rates.
Length in Words, Letters, Emojis
First of all, there is the length? You don’t want these long 15, 20 word email subjects.
You also don’t want a weird one word, like hello, question mark.
You want a nice set of words 3, 5, 7 words, maybe you have an emoji. You need to think about the right length of your email subject lines.
Play With Upper/Lower Case
Next, you’re going to want to play with the case. Some words might be uppercase.
You don’t want to scream the whole thing. Some of it could be all lowercase. You might not even put a period, like without punctuation. It’s just like you writing to a friend, like, hey, Marissa, check this out.
You’re just writing those sentences just like that. You might write it as almost like a heading where it’s like a title case. But then it’s formatted and that may not be your style, especially if you’re teaching kind of informal creative.
Use Name or Other to Personalize
Next is, try to personalize these email subject lines and you can also try to personalize the email body. When people sign up for your email or they buy one of your products or services. Whether it’s a course, a community or coaching, you might know their first name, last name, etc.
If you have it, it’d be pretty cool. These email programs have a parameter where you can insert their name. That’s pretty great, and that’s going to be highly personal, it’s probably not junk and they’re probably going to read it.
But you have to be careful to not put in those prompts for names or other things. Then what happens when you don’t have the name of some people. It’ll be a space or comma because it doesn’t have a name. So you’re going to want to think about this.
You might want to have room. Your email list, your email database, etc, so that you can do this. Then of course there’s some people who like long names and nicknames and things like that. You’re going to want to make sure that you don’t butcher their name. But if you can figure it out and maybe you have a small to medium list and it’s clean, sending an email with a subject line or the intro to the body with their name does really work. That’s very personal.
Leveraging Relevant Segmentation
You may also want to leverage some of your segmentation. When they sign up for stuff, maybe they’ve purchased a certain course from you or a certain digital product, that they might be flagged for a certain type of design or a certain type of program.
Also, as you collect their name, you might also collect some other segmentation, and then you can use that in an email subject line or in the body or just maybe at a higher level, you use that information to send different emails to different people based on their interests and needs.
Avoid Spam Word Triggers
Now, of course, we have to be careful to not include any spam words. Remember, when you send out an email, it goes through dozens of little email servers, and they’re checking addresses, IPs, and your domain. Who’s the sender? What’s the exact mailbox number that this is coming from?
As part of that, they’re checking the text, the subject, form, everything they’re checking. They’re obviously looking for naughty words, but also spam words, like get rich and find love, etc., be careful that you’re not doing too many spam words.
You’re going to let them know about your offer, but you don’t want to write ‘get rich’ in capital letters. So just watch out for those things. It might not affect just that one email. It might affect your entire email address as well as your domain.
Actionable Words – Verbs, Timely
Finally, use action words on your subject. These are not on every email but you can do this from time to time where you want it to be actionable, almost like a verb or timely. You’re making them want to click open to solve, learn, do or get something.
Those kinds of actionable words on your subject line is going to really help and you want to get to it in a relatively quick way, on the third, fourth word, because maybe they’re looking at their email on a mobile phone, and they’re not going to get to see seven words that you pick for your email.
Within a few words, you want it to be actionable. You want to mention the thing that they’re going to learn or get. That’s going to help you get better open rates on your emails.
Benefits:
Now let’s go over some of the benefits of watching your email subject lines and carefully choosing the right words and all the real benefits that it does for your training company.
Keep Your Domain on Approve List
First of all, it keeps your domain on the approved list. Like I said, there’s all these lists out there that the email servers all rely on, and they know who is a bad sender, who has tricky content, suspicious content.
You don’t want to even be anywhere on those lists. So this is not only for your email address that you’re sending from, like info@, tips@, but also your domain. Your actual name dot com or whatever it is that you use. You don’t want your domain getting in trouble. Sometimes for certain things like cold emails, or if you have a really large email list, you may want to use just a separate domain just for your outbound email and it could be a sub domain.
It’s like mail.yourdomain.com. Anyways, the point is to protect your domain. You’ve been spending potentially years building out your training company, and you don’t want to mess with your brand.
Keep People from Unsubscribing
Another big benefit is that by having emails that are good and are clean, that get through, that people are actually opening, you’re going to reduce your unsubscribe rate. Whether it’s people unsubscribing because you gave them a link, or maybe they’re just using this higher level Hotmail, Gmail that’s sort of sending mixed messages about your company.
You don’t want anybody to unsubscribe. You want people to be there because they want to be there, they like the stuff, and when they’re done, they can unsubscribe naturally. In general, when you’re sending good emails with good, clean email subject lines, there won’t be any accidents either, where by accident, they might flag you as unsubscribed.
Even though they might like your stuff, for whatever reason, that particular subject line was a little bit odd or they didn’t recognize the topic or something like that.
Delivering Value to Our Subscribers
When your emails are getting through, you’re going to actually deliver value to your subscribers. They’re actually opening it and you’re going to be top of their mind as a service provider, so they’re going to know who your brand is. They’re going to open it, to read it.
They’re going to look forward to your emails. So a lot of great stuff happens when they’re reading your emails, they’re looking at it, they’re scanning it and they’re actually going in to not only see your information, tips or resources. But also as you start to deliver offers, right products, coupons, promotions, opportunities to your prospects and students, they’ll get to see those.
Just like pure math, If more people are opening your emails, then more percentage, a higher percentage of people are going to potentially click on your offers and your other resources. So that’s going to be great, so it’s just all of these things are going to help the overall funnel, if you will.
So more emails are getting opened and getting read. Then more clicks are happening to your services and your partners and all the other good things that you want to pass along.
Have Your Fans Forward Your Emails
Finally, one of the benefits of getting your emails open is more referrals. Your fans are going to forward your emails. They’re going to share your emails. They might use social buttons. They might forward an email to a friend or a couple of friends. Those friends could then subscribe either to your email or follow you on one of your socials.
Those referrals, that network is going to eventually buy a certain percentage of things from you, even if it’s just 1%. If 1 percent of the people are forwarding your email and a small percentage of those people are buying your services, or just learning about you and in the future, they’ll buy after they know, like and trust you,
So, there’s this whole networking, sharing effect that happens. You have to get your emails open. So, that’s why subject lines are really important.
Example: Subject Lines for Hair Dyeing Teacher
Now let’s check out an example. lLet’s just say you’re a teacher and you’re teaching hair dyeing, so you’re in fashion, you’re in hairstyling, etc, and you have a blog all about hair and styles, coloring and cuts. You have this blog and maybe at the end of the blog, you might teach a teacher or you might have a course on hair dyeing techniques.
Let’s go over some of the lessons that we went over for subject lines. Think about how we might apply those.
Maybe at first you write amazing tips that get wow reactions. Wow, that’s a lot there, people might not even get to see that other stuff if they’re looking at it on a phone. You might chop up some of that and you want that keyword, that hook, that ombre, two tone look. You want that to pop and be eye -catching right from the beginning.
Length
You want that in the first few words and maybe you just trim it. You just trim some of the fat and maybe it’s not as descriptive, but that’s okay. Let’s get them almost like an advertisement. The main goal of every piece is to get them to the next step. So the goal is just to get them to the body.
You might just reduce this to just say amazing on break transition tips for stylists or something like that. So not nine, ten words, bring it down to five, six words.
Case
Next up is the case. Maybe you might want to do highlighting and actually in capitals. And maybe you might not have a word and maybe you wanna emphasize that.
So that might be caps or maybe something about a particular technique is really difficult. You might capitalize or even exclamation point hard. Putting it all together, you might have capital. Highlighting does not have to be hard.
Personalization
Next up is personalization. You might know the people who subscribe to your blog. You might know them by name. So wouldn’t it be cool if you’re like, “hey, Mira, want to know my favorite shampoos and conditioners?” Wow, the first word is their name. They’re scanning their mailbox on their tablet or their computer, they’re going to click on that. Of course, they’re going to recognize your brand if you use a good brand email.
So you can mix it up. You could give them that important hook line that they can trust you. They know it’s you. They look, they double check where this comes from. Then, yeah, they’re going to click and do more. That’s going to be a great way to use personalization and reordering your words to get people to open up more emails.
Relevance
Next is relevance. They may have opted in for a certain kind of newsletter. Maybe you have different newsletters, different topics, or maybe you cover a wide range of things, but you want your email subject line to appeal and be honest about what you’re going to cover. Maybe you might have some stuff for like senior women , maybe about their hair or thinning hair or whatever.
So you can go ahead and call that out, put that up front. Maybe cover thinning hair and scalp for aging women, or maybe aging women need help with their thinning hair. You’re going to play with something that doesn’t have to be crazy long. You’re just going to get that hook in there.
You’re going to make it feel natural. Also, you’re not going to trick them. If the mails don’t appeal to them, they’ll just delete, or they might just quickly scan and then delete, and that’s okay. At least they’re not going to unsubscribe you.
At least you’re not going to get reported spam and for the people that really want it, and they’re really interested in that, they’re going to go all the way through potentially. That’s your goal.
Avoid Spam Words
Next up is you’re going to avoid spam words, So you’re teaching all about hair coloring. So you’re not going to say, “hey, make crazy money by helping rich and famous people,” don’t put any emoji for dollar signs, or that little face with the dollar sign eyeballs and the dollar sign tongue.
Don’t do that. Yeah, it might work for a few people, but a lot of other people or systems like the robots that are monitoring all this email, they’re going to flag you for rich and money and all this sort of stuff. So avoid those spam words.
You’re teaching about different hair coloring techniques, you’d want to make it actionable. So you might say something like download our new eyebrow dyeing kit checklist. Maybe that’s too long and you might want to make it actionable like, “get our eyebrow checklist”, “our eyebrow color checklist.” Something like that.
Actionable
They’re going to click it because it has that verb. That’s where you can take your time to build out a story, give them tips, and then get them back to your blog, your course or your community.
In general, this is how emails with smart subject lines work. They’re going to catch more attention and they’re going to get more action going to start off by getting an open, not a negative action, a delete and unsubscribe or spam report, and then once they get that open, you’re on your way to dance.
You’re downhill. You’re on your way to do the next thing. And the next thing could be learning, getting, buying, et cetera.
FAQs on Email Subject Line Tips for Online Teachers
Summary – Email Subject Line Tips for Online Teachers
Email subject lines are like the title of a book, they help people decide if they want to read it. For online teachers, a good subject line should be short, clear, and tell the reader what the email is about. You can make it more personal by using their name or talking about something specific, like their progress. Adding words that create excitement or urgency can also grab attention. Try to avoid using all caps, too many exclamation marks, or confusing phrases. Over time, you can test what works best to get more people to open your emails.
Here are the top things you need to know about email subject tips:
- Pay attention to the length of your email subject line
- Play the case when writing your email subject line
- Personalize sometimes with the name of the receiver
- Try to be relevant depending on what they subscribed for
- Avoid using too much spam words and be actionable
So now, you’re a lot smarter. Thanks for hanging out!
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