I cleaned out my inbox on Sunday at the kitchen table with cold coffee, and I went all the way back to March to do it. Two hundred and some emails from brands, nearly all of them opening the same way. During these uncertain times. In this moment. A message from our CEO. A mattress company, a shoe company, and the company that sells me printer ink were all reaching out from the heart of the same sentence.
I could not tell them apart. That is the problem, and it did not start in March.
A subject line is the only piece of brand expression that has to survive being seen next to your competitors, your mother, and a fraud alert from your bank. It is thirty to fifty characters, rendered in a font you do not control, on a screen you cannot design. It is the most constrained brand surface anyone owns, and most companies hand it to whoever is closest to the send button.
If your subject line could be swapped with a competitor's and nobody would notice, you do not have a voice, you have a template.
One. Sound like a person, not a department. Oatly's subject lines read like the copywriter is amusing himself and does not much care whether you approve, which is precisely the impression the carton gives. Consistency across surfaces is not a style guide. It is a personality that does not change when it changes rooms.
Two. Say the thing. The tease is a habit inherited from the years when open rate was the only number anyone reported upward. You can win the open and lose the person. Salt & Straw tells me the flavor. That is it, the flavor, in the subject line, and I know within a second whether I care. Respect converts.
Three. Be recognizable at a glance. Nobody reads an inbox. People scan a sender column and four words of subject, and decide. If your voice only shows up after the click, it does not exist. Whatever is distinctive about how you write, move some of it to the front.
None of this is expensive. It is a decision about who is allowed to write and how many people get to soften it on the way out. I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. The subject line is the last thing anyone reviews and the first thing anyone reads.
The subject line is the last thing anyone reviews and the first thing anyone reads.
My karaoke bar in Southeast has been dark since March. The host who calls everyone baby started a mailing list in April, and his subject lines are things like BABY WE ARE STILL HERE, and I open every one of them immediately, well before the mattress company. Nobody advised him. He just sounds like himself, which is the entire trick.