How To Create Welcome Email Subject Lines With High Open Rates
A great welcome email subject line not only grabs your customers' attention but can also lead to a high open rate. This article provides insight into some of the best practices to create a welcome email subject line that can boost your email open rates.
Welcome emails are essential to set the right foundation for a solid relationship with customers. However, even if you create an effective welcome email campaign, it won’t matter if your customers aren’t opening your emails.
When it comes to increasing email open rates, the biggest challenge is the subject line. According to a study, two-thirds of customers mark an email as spam based on the subject line alone. This shows the importance of writing a subject line that will create positive sentiment and encourage customers to open your email.
So, we’ve written this article to help you write great welcome email subject lines that will entice your customers to open your emails and read further. We’ve also curated a list of some of the best examples of welcome email subject lines to inspire you as you create your email subject lines.
Let’s begin by explaining what makes a great welcome email subject line.
Table of contents
- What makes a great welcome email subject line?
- Examples of the best welcome email subject lines
- How to write a great welcome email subject line for your business
- Getting started on your welcome email subject lines
What makes a great welcome email subject line?
That 47% of customers decide to open an email based on its subject line alone is enough reason for you to want to crack the code to write a great welcome email subject line.
A great subject line grabs your customers’ attention and entices them to open your email and read further. But that's not all, here’s a brief overview of the details that can make your subject line stand out. As you read further, we’ll go deeper into each of these strategic tips to write a great subject line.
- Personalize it
- Add value
- Ask a question that inspires curiosity in your subscribers
- Keep it short
- Make it specific
- Run A/B testing
Now, let’s move on to some examples of some of the best welcome email subject lines.
Examples of the best welcome email subject lines
The following examples highlight valuable tips that can inspire you to write the best welcome email subject lines for your email marketing efforts.
1. Zapier
Subject line— getting started: what’s a Zap?
This welcome email subject line from Zapier uses a question to get its customers curious. This subject line is effective because it is the first step to making customers develop more interest in your brand. In this email, when customers open the email, they’ll go through educative email content that will satisfy their curiosity.
2. Felina
Subject line: Hi again, reminding you to save 10% off
This welcome email subject line from Felina gives new subscribers a valuable offer. As it turns out, people will be more willing to engage with your email if you give them a valuable offer like a freebie or discount code—just like Felina did in its welcome email.
3. Swoon
Subject line: Welcome to the sweet life
“Welcome to the sweet life” is a definitive statement is capture a customer’s attention. The word “sweet” triggers a positive feeling and would make customers want to be part of a sweet experience.
This subject line shows that you should use power words in your welcome email subject lines to trigger an emotional reaction in customers.
4. All Trails
Subject line: ⛰️ AllTrails 101: Planning your adventure
This subject line from All Trails applies an educative approach and sets the right expectations. This way, customers can get curious to learn how to make the best use of the service.
5. YNAB
Subject line: To succeed with YNAB, you just need to…
YNAB uses an unfinished statement to get customers to open its email. This subject line is effective because it combines a power word like ”succeed” and an unfinished statement—to trigger an emotional reaction and pique the customer’s curiosity at the same time.
How to write a great welcome email subject line for your business
So far, we’ve shown you some of the best examples of subject lines. Now, let’s go into the best practices for writing welcome email subject lines that can boost your open rates.
1. Personalize it
While this may seem obvious, it’s still an overlooked tactic in email marketing. Writing an email without adding personalization can make customers less eager to open your emails. To prevent this from happening, it's best that you include personalization in your welcome email subject lines.
To make your personalization more effective, you need to create customer segments and send your emails based on specific customer data. This way, customers will easily relate to your subject line and will be more interested to open your email to know what you have for them.
2. Add value
In most cases, nobody likes to pass up on a valuable offer. So, you can use this as an opportunity to lead your subject line with a valuable offer that your customers will love. Email coupons and discount codes are good examples of valuable offers that can increase your email open rates.
Ensure you include specific discount offers, remember that you have limited time to grab your customers' attention, so, avoid beating around the bush.
If you put the good stuff at the beginning of your welcome email subject line, it can easily grab your customer’s attention. Even more, it can encourage customers to buy from you.
3. Ask a question that inspires curiosity in your customers
Asking questions is a great way to inspire curiosity in your customers. Once you ask a question that gets customers curious, it becomes an itch that they’ll need to scratch by opening your email.
When someone signs up for your service, you can ask a question that makes them curious about your company. Open-ended questions are ideal in this case, they trigger curiosity and give the customer something to think about.
4. Keep it short
You need to remember the character limit when writing welcome email subject lines. A long subject line will be cut short—especially on a mobile device. This can instantly impact the message that your customer ought to get from your subject line.
For this reason, stick to a character count that’s suitable enough to pass your message. A study from Marketo shows that 7 words seem to be a sweet spot compared to subject lines with 4 – 10 words.
With this limited space, you need to figure out the ideal words that instantly grab your customers’ attention, inspire curiosity and make them eager to open your emails.
5. Make it specific
One thing that can ruin your conversion is a subject line that doesn’t align with your email content. Customers will feel deceived and might even mark your email as spam.
So you need to ensure that your welcome email subject line is specific and consistent with your email content. If your subject line states that your email includes a freebie or discount code, ensure that include it in your email for your customer to easily access it.
6. Run A/B testing
The truth is that this journey to writing the best welcome email subject line is a matter that involves consistent testing. Some subject lines may work, others may not.
Even a single change of word in your subject line can be the reason why your email open rate can skyrocket overnight. But the only way to learn what works and spot a change like that is by running an A/B test.
In this case, An A/B test involves creating two versions of subject lines and sending them to a predefined audience base. Then you analyze the results to learn how each audience base responds to the two variants. You can check out this article we wrote about email A/B testing to learn more about how to apply it to your email marketing campaigns.
Getting started on your welcome email subject lines
Writing a great welcome email subject line can be challenging. It requires consistent practice and you need the best tips to help you create subject lines that will boost your open rates. Use the tips we mentioned above to guide you and make them part of your overall welcome email campaign strategy.
While writing a great subject line is crucial to achieving a high open rate, you also need to remember the potential of welcome emails and how to properly structure them. There won’t be any point in getting a high open-rate and poor engagement rate because your welcome email wasn’t properly written and designed.
For that, we have an in-depth comprehensive guide that helps you understand everything you need to know about welcome emails, including how to write the copy, and when to automate them to send.
Check out the guide on welcome emails here.
At Engage, you can use our email marketing automation solution to track all of your customer data and use that data to create unique customer segments and automated messaging sequences for your email marketing campaigns.
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