A significant amount of effort is put into capturing a user’s email address, building various segments, designing emails that look appealing, and delivering a clear message. However, if your recipient does not open your emails, all your effort has gone to waste. To make your life a little easier, I’ll be discussing some helpful tips and best practices to improve subject lines and in effect improve email open rates.

• Keep your subject line at a 50 character limit. All Email Service Providers (ESP) have a limit to how many characters will be displayed in subject lines. The last thing you want to do is have your subject line be cut off, resulting in a poor email open rate.

• Create a sense of urgency.
• If you have any questions on this, simply ask yourself, which of the following two looks more appealing as a subject line?
• "Get Your Exclusive Coupon Code!"
• "Get Your Exclusive Coupon Code—Offer Ends in 24 Hours!"

• Personalize. Personalizing your messages brings value to your emails. I know it’s not always easy to personalize a subject line depending on what industry you’re sending emails from, but doing an A/B test never hurts.

• Avoid “spammy” words.
• Spam filters look for certain phrases in your email and subject line that you as a marketer should avoid. These phrases are not hard to spot and often sound like a sales pitches.
• A few examples are: “As seen on ______,” “earn cash,” “FREE,” “opportunity,” “lower” or “lowest.”

• Be consistent. Don’t mislead your reader into opening your emails by advertising a half off sale only to have the reader find out that the deal only applies to a particular product.

• A/B Testing is essential.
• After implementing the tips above, the last and most important step is to keep periodically doing A/B tests on subject lines.
• Performing A/B tests can help increase conversions, learn about your audience, as well as adjust to the ever-changing trends. After all, just because something worked once doesn’t mean it will work every time.

Using these tips, you can take steps towards higher email open rates. An improvement in open rate can ultimately trickle down and make a significant difference in other areas of your email department.