How to write better subject lines: Part I

You could go for the sensationalist method, as MarketingSherpa did with yesterday's "53% of Email Subject Lines Broken" theme.

The headline is annoyingly misleading, since the exclusive research the article reports on suggests nothing of the sort. Yet the research *is* interesting.

How text displays is also subject to the vagaries of the webmail service or software your recipients use to view your email. So if your subject line isn't encoded properly, it can get garbled.

Now the words "character encoding" probably elicit blank looks from most of us. But don't panic (as I did unnecessarily when reading the article headline), since if you're typing your subject line into your email marketing software or service directly, then it's not an issue.

It becomes an issue when copying and pasting from a typical word processor or when using "unusual" text characters, such as accents, umlauts and curly quotes.

Sherpa's article includes an extensive and valuable report from Pivotal Veracity that introduces you to the basics of character encoding, outlines potential problems and identifies easy solutions.

More on subject lines | Tags: email marketing, subject lines, character encoding

Permalink | June 13, 2007 | 0 comment(s)
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