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Your subject line is the most important part of your email. If you aren’t grabbing people’s attention with your subject line and creating some form of connection, your email doesn’t even get opened. So, if you want to know the best email subject lines that will convert at the highest level, today’s episode is for you.
There are some email subject lines that have performed super well for me, so I encourage you to steal them for yourself. I’ve also collected email subject lines from different corners of the internet that are amazing examples you can adapt and use as well.
Tune in this week to discover the best email subject lines. I’m showing you how to connect with people on a personal level in just a few words, how to stand out from the crowd in your ideal client’s inbox and grab their attention, and I’m giving you examples of subject lines you can use right now to get more visibility in your business.
Want to hone your offer? The more succinctly you can communicate your offer, the easier you can sell, so join me for Nail Your Offer. This workshop is available at a ridiculously low price and you can get all the details by clicking here!
What You’ll Learn on this Episode:
- What grabs my attention in an email subject line.
- How the emails you receive can be an endless source of inspiration.
- A strategy for sending personalized emails to your whole mailing list.
- How to pique the recipient’s curiosity in the subject line.
- Examples of the best email subject lines you can start using in your own business.
Mentioned on the Show:
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- Join me in Business Minded here.
- Follow me on Instagram or Facebook!
- Grab the Podcast Roadmap!
- Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity through Conscious Thinking by Jody Moore
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- Get my Free Training on How to Develop a Coaching Practice
- Taylor Conroy
- Thought Leader
- Marie Forleo
- Claire Pelletreau
- Grant Baldwin
- James Wedmore
- The Mind Your Business Podcast
- Roberta West
- John Assaraf
- Jon Acuff
- Soundtracks by Jon Acuff
I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, Entre-Talk: The Best Email Subject Lines.
This is Better Than Happy, the podcast where we study what the healthiest, most successful people in today’s world think, feel and do. And we leverage this knowledge to create our best lives. Are you ready, little bird? Let’s fly.
Hey everybody, welcome to Entre-Talk. We’re going to get right into some nitty gritty today and talk about email subject lines. And I’m going to share with you some of the email subject lines that have converted the best for me. And I would encourage you to go ahead and just steal them. And I’m going to share some others with you that I have collected because I collect good emails, especially when the subject line is good. A lot of times the subject line is the most important part of your email.
Stop and think about why, because if the subject line doesn’t grab us and it isn’t compelling and it doesn’t apply to us or it’s too pushy or too aggressive or too salesy, then we’re not even opening that email. We just think about all the emails that you don’t pay attention to at all.
So before we get into that I want to also tell you that I have a brand new course I want to encourage you to come and join me for because I’ve been talking a lot this year about your offer. We’ve done several podcast episodes in the Entre-Talk series that have focused on how important it is to get your offer right. Your offer is sort of the first thing you have to figure out. If you’re a teacher, healer, coach, expert of some sort, what is it that you offer? What kind of transformation I should say, do you provide for people? Who is it for?
And how do you describe it in such a way that people feel like you really understand them and have the solution to their problem? How do you create a solution that’s different than what they’ve heard before? And how do you then deliver that transformation or solution? The better you are at really getting all of that right, really being able to succinctly describe it and nail it down, the easier everything after that will be when it comes to marketing and selling your offer and then even delivering on that offer for your clients or customers.
My guess is though, that most people that I work with anyway and come into contact with as we work on businesses. They’re already really good at helping people. They do know how, once you get somebody in the door, once you have a client or customer there, you know how to guide them and help them. You’re probably really good at that. The part that people struggle with is knowing how, again, to describe it and how to market it and sell it. So that is why I’ve created a workshop called Nail Your Offer.
And we’re going to be working together virtually and it’s at a ridiculously low price. And so I want to encourage you to just go get all of the details at jodymoore.com/nailyouroffer. I want to help you nail your offer. I’m also going to be talking to you on there about what I will, on this podcast call Better Than Happy Business School 2.0. Because if any of you have been on any of the calls I did earlier this year, where we rolled out Better Than Happy Business School.
What I did after I rolled it out and heard the questions and concerns that people had. We had a lot of you sign up to go through business school, but we had a lot of you say that you had some questions and concerns. And I heard your questions and concerns. And so I totally reworked Better Than Happy Business School including a new price point that will accommodate a lot of you. So anyway, there are a lot of options.
And I’ll be going over those in the workshop, Nail Your Offer, towards the end. If you don’t want that part, it’s not going to be a dominant part of the workshop. You can just drop off the call, no problem. But for those of you who want help building your businesses throughout 2024, we have an amazing program we’ve put together to help you to do that and I think you’re going to like it.
So okay, I want to talk about some of my favorite email subject lines. So I mentioned this briefly at the beginning but let me just reiterate. One of the things I do is I pay attention to the emails that come into my inbox. I have a Gmail account that I use when I buy something online or have to give an email for the doctor’s office or my kids’ school or whatever it is. My opt-in email, when I opt-in to people’s things is my Gmail account because I know I’m going to get flooded with a bunch of emails and don’t hate me.
But as I look at my inbox, you know on your computer or your phone you have the little red bubble that tells you how many unread emails you have? I have 99,651 unread emails. I know that is making some of you just cringe right now. But I’ll tell you what I do is I scroll through and grab the important ones, again, the ones from my kids’ school and things like that.
And then I pay attention to the email subject lines of other ones and I see what grabs my attention and not very many things grab my attention, I’ll tell you, but a few do and when they do, I drag those emails into my inbox so that I can refer to them as examples when I go to write my own emails. And then normally I’m pretty good about just dumping my whole Gmail inbox every few months, but obviously I haven’t done that in a while. That’s why I have so many unread emails in there. At any rate, I highly encourage you do this.
I encourage that as an online marketer and as an entrepreneur and business owner that you start looking at the world through the lens of a marketer and a business owner. Big companies that have a lot of money to spend on marketing are testing things, and then they discover what works. And then we can piggyback off of that. We can emulate that in a way that is ethical. I’m not saying directly copy people, but in an ethical way. So first of all I want to tell you about some of the email subject lines that work well and by work well I mean, they get people to stop and read them.
What’s in the email then should sell people on either clicking or whatever is the next step you want them to take. So you can put people’s first name in the email and I recommend that you do that from time to time. So depending on who your email service provider is, they will probably have a little snippet of code that goes into the subject line and it will be something like F name or first name. Some snippet of code, you might have to Google it to figure out what the code is.
But your email service provider will give you a snippet of code and then when you put that code in then it will populate in the person’s first name. I like to do this because it makes it seem more personal. So I’ll say, “Hey, Jody”, if the email’s coming to me, “Hey, Jody.” And then whatever I want to say after it. So sometimes something as simple as putting their first name in, sometimes putting a little emoji in the subject line will make it stand out a little bit from all the other emails coming in their inbox. So there’s some simple things like that that you can do.
One of the subject lines that converts the best for me that we use often when we’re about to close the doors on something. If we have a cart open to a course or a program or something like that and the doors are about to close, I will use the subject line, Hey, first name, Hey, Jody, don’t be mad at me. And then the email talks about, hey, this is the last day, the doors will be closing or this bonus or discount is ending. And if you reach out to me next week and ask for it, we’re going to have to say no, we’re so sorry, but this is the deadline.
I don’t want you to be mad. If you’re like me and you miss it and then you’re mad about it, that’s going to be a bummer. So don’t be mad at me, just join right now. Sign up right now. Get the thing right now. Get the deal. Get the discount. Get the bonus. Get in the doors, whatever it is so that you don’t miss it. It’s really simple, but notice how the subject line, don’t be mad at me, piques our curiosity. We’re like, “Why would I be mad at her? Did she do something terrible?” So always be thinking about that. What’s going to pique someone’s curiosity enough to open the email?
Now, I should have said this at the beginning, but we all have varying comfort levels with catching someone’s attention versus doing a bait and switch. I personally do not like to do a bait and switch where you don’t have the magazines and the stores will say, “Are Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston getting back together again?” I mean that’s what it used to say, probably 10 years ago, whoever the couple is now. Are they getting together or are they getting a divorce or is she pregnant? And then you open up the magazine and you read the article and the answer’s no.
No, they’re not getting together. No, she’s not pregnant. No, they’re not getting a divorce. It’s kind of a bait and switch. The question isn’t exactly a lie because it was a question. But it leads you to believe something’s true that’s actually not true at all. So I don’t like to do something that feels like I’m tricking you into opening it. But I am willing to pique your curiosity enough to get you to open or read. And sometimes the level at which I’m willing to do that, you may not be comfortable with. You might feel like that’s a little bit crossing the line for me and I’m cool with that.
You have the line wherever you want to have the line. I don’t want to do anything that feels outside of integrity for me. And I don’t want you to do anything that feels outside of integrity for you. So that said, I’m going to go to my folder that I have in my inbox here called marketing ideas. And I’m going to share some of them with you here. So I got a message, I have talked about Taylor Conroy before.
Taylor Conroy is a marketing genius or his team is. I don’t know who writes his emails but they’re so good. They always catch my attention. I got one just the other day that said, I’m SO sorry, Jody. And then in parentheses, (seriously, this one’s on me.) So notice he put my name in it. He’s like, “I’m SO sorry. (Seriously, this one’s on me.”) And it makes me think, what happened? I didn’t even know that he had done anything wrong that I should be upset about. But it piques my curiosity enough to open the email to look at what the body says.
And the email says, when I checked the sign up list for today’s webinar, I did not see your name. I could be wrong, but the last thing I want is for you to miss this training. And so I’m sending this last minute email from the waiting room, it happens in 30 minutes. I’m going live, blah blah blah. Click here. So that’s what the message was. He’s saying, “I’m SO sorry, if you are on here and I didn’t see it, but I don’t see you here.” So it just, it caught my attention. It got me to look. It was a short message, pretty impactful email.
And he goes on to then sell the thing, this was a free training he wanted me to join by the way. By guaranteeing that free training he’s going to sell something, he’s going to sell his amazing offer which he does have a great offer, by the way. I purchased his course that helps you write, land and deliver your TEDx talk. And I know you’re like, “Well, then, Jody, where’s your TEDx talk?” You know what? I have not done, I’ve done some of the work in his program, but I have a lot more to do. I need to go land myself a TEDx talk. But his product is there. It’s on me now to own it.
Okay, here’s another one, actually from them I’ll just share because I threw it in my folder here. It says, “Jody, want to get on paid stages, get on TV and impact millions with your message?” So again, this is a company that teaches for the most part public speaking, getting your message out there into the world. And notice it had my first name and it talked about getting on paid stages, getting on TV, things that I’m like, “Yeah, I would kind of like to do that. How do I do that?”
Here’s another email I popped into my marketing folder. The subject says, “Psst.” You spell that P-S-S-T, by the way, in case you’re wondering, “Psst, I heard you like deals.” So it’s kind of playful, the way the subject line is written. And it implies that they’re going to tell me how to save money and it’s sort of light. So I don’t know, I just kind of like that one, “Psst, I heard you like deals.” What else?
Here’s another Taylor Conroy one. Taylor, I’m giving away all your email subject lines. They’re so good. Taylor said in all capital letters, “ACTION NEEDED” with a colon. And then it said, “Save your seat at Hawaii Business, Mastermind.” So just putting that, ACTION NEEDED, makes our brains think this is something I should be paying attention to. Sometimes we’ll send an email, say, “Reply needed ASAP. Urgent issue.”
Now, again, I wouldn’t recommend you do that all the time with every email, but every now and then when you want to grab someone’s attention. “Hey, there’s something you need to do here if you want this opportunity.”
Here’s one from Marie Forleo, who’s another online marketing genius who will teach you all kinds of amazing things. And I highly recommend you follow these people who are successful, you guys, because they have great marketing strategies that again, you can modify and make them your own. Marie’s subject line, and I should note that none of the words are capitalized here. It says, “just six hours left, then it’s GONE.” GONE is in all caps, but everything else is lowercase, “just six hours left.”
Even something as simple as making things all lowercase sometimes helps it land in more inboxes, because if you capitalize the beginning of every letter in your subject line, it looks like a title which looks like marketing. When we write emails to our friends, oftentimes we do it in a real hurry and we’re like, “who’s coming to 4th of July assignments”, or whatever, and we don’t bother with capitalizing. Certainly, we don’t capitalize every word, but maybe we don’t even bother with capitalizing the first letter. So that’s a strategy I’m noticing a lot of marketers do.
Here’s another one from Claire Pelletreau, who’s a brilliant online marketer who specializes in Facebook ads and social media. And her subject line is again in all lowercase, nothing capital. And it says, “my head almost exploded.” And then it has a little emoji, a surprise face emoji, “my head almost exploded.” Do you notice how it sort of catches your attention? You’re like, “What?” It’s quick. It seems personal. It’s got. A little emoji there.
Here’s another one from a thought leader that says, “Thought leaders going out of business…” Now, some people might feel this is a little bait and switchy because when you go on and read it, they explain that they’re going to do a webinar, teaching you what they would do if they went out of business. I sort of mirrored this recently in my own business. So if that feels like crossing a line to you, don’t do it. I loved it because it made me open it up. I was like, “What?”
And then the email says, “Taylor’s going live tomorrow. He’s going to pretend that thought leader has disappeared for good and then he’s going to share exactly what he would do step by step to launch a new business.” So how are you going to get people’s attention?
Here’s one from Grant Baldwin. I like Grant Baldwin. He is a speaking coach who coaches you on, I’m assuming he will coach you on your talk, but also really specializes in the business part of being a public speaker. And he does this course called How to Get Booked and Paid to Speak. And so his subject line, again he put our first names in it. So it says, “Jody, want a coaching call with me?”
I want to say I don’t see it here in my folder, but I recall getting another email from Grant Baldwin that said, “Jody, I have a paid speaking gig for you.” And in the message then he described how, I want to say in his program, he was guaranteeing a paid speaking gig if you went through some program or something. That’s so effective. “Jody, I have a paid speaking gig for you.” If I am potentially interested in getting paid speaking gigs, that speaks to me. I’m going to open that up and see what that’s about.
Here’s one from James Wedmore. I love following James Wedmore. He’s got a great podcast called Mind Your Business that focuses on the mindset and he teaches again online marketing and business building strategy. And his subject just says, “Does this answer your question?” It kind of piques my curiosity, especially because I know James Wedmore. This is an important point, by the way. If it were just from some random person I don’t follow and I don’t really know, I probably would have ignored that one.
But because I follow him because he’s really consistent in publishing his podcast every week, he puts out great content. Everything he teaches feels like a real value add to me. Then when he asks that, I’m kind of curious, what does he even think my question is? I didn’t know I had a question really but do I? What is he talking about here? So that’s an important component here.
Here’s one from somebody I honestly don’t remember who this is. I don’t know if this is something free I signed up for or something I paid for or what this person teaches. But I put their email, I think this is probably a course I purchased from somebody named Roberta West. And the subject line says, “You’ve been granted access to”, and then the name of the course is in quotes. This one is called Launch Plan in a Day. And I just like the verbiage of that.
When people are signing up for our free stuff. I like the verbiage of you’ve been granted access to this thing because it makes me feel like I’m important and special. I’ve been granted access even though I was granted it because I signed up for it or I paid it. It’s still, I don’t know, there was something about it that I liked better than just, it made me feel like this is an important email I should save rather than just, here’s your thing you signed up for. You’ve been granted access. A little change.
Here’s one from John Assaraf. I apologize if I’m saying your name wrong, John, but John is, again, he teaches all kinds of things. He calls his business the NeuroGym. And he’s all about mindset and the neurology of your brain. And this email, I liked the honesty of this subject line, and obviously this came in back in 2021. It says, “My last ditch effort to make your dreams a reality in 2021.” And he goes on to talk about, “Hey, I’ve been trying to encourage you to come and join me in this program but you haven’t.”
And then he goes on, he says this, “But you didn’t pull the trigger. And it’s either my fault”, and then he says in parentheses (wouldn’t be the first time) or you’ve given up on overcoming your mental and emotional obstacles. Anyway, so then he goes on to describe, he says, “And that means it’s probably my fault because my guess is you haven’t given up otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.” It’s just the whole email is so compelling but the subject line, again, I love the honesty. This is my last ditch effort to make your dreams a reality.
Notice it’s not his last ditch effort to get me to sign up for his program. It’s his last ditch effort to make my dreams a reality. And that makes me at least curious about what he’s going to say. Here’s one that I don’t know that I would do this one. I’m going to go ahead and just leave anonymous the people that sent it because I don’t know how I feel about this. I just want to share it with you. Maybe there’s a way we can modify it. It feels a little bait and switchy to me is what I’m saying.
So I got this email that says, “Jody, our appointment is April 7th, 12:30pm.” Now, this is a company that I’ve followed for a long time. It’s an organization whose podcast I’ve listened to for many, many years. And actually I was even on their podcast once. And so when I got this I was like, “Wait. Do I have an appointment I didn’t know about?” Which is exactly what was supposed to happen. Did I schedule it? I don’t remember scheduling something.
And then when you open the email, it says, “I’d love to hang out with you for about an hour next Wednesday, April 7th at 12:30 to talk about your future.” And it goes on to describe this, basically webinar that’s happening on that date. And so it’s not a webinar that I had registered for, I should say. Maybe if the person had registered, maybe that would be a great reminder email, our appointment is or you’re scheduled for April 7th at 12:30pm.
I would feel better about that than just, by the way, this is an email trying to get me to sign up for the webinar. So I don’t know. I think it’s a good subject line in the right setting, feels a little bait and switchy to me otherwise.
Here’s one I really liked from Jon Acuff, who’s an author. And this was back in March of 2021 before his book, at the time it was his new book, Soundtracks was going to come out. And you may notice when authors have a new book coming out, they’re often trying to get us to pre-order. And his subject line said, “Why your pre-order matters.” Which I appreciated because have you ever wondered that? I mean, I have a book and I still don’t quite, I mean, I do kind of understand why a pre-order matters, but I didn’t really.
And so he went on to explain it to us. He explained how it benefits the authors. And then he explained how it can benefit us as a reader or someone who might purchase the book. And then he reminded us of all the bonuses he was going to give us if we pre-ordered his book. Again, at times I want to pique people’s curiosity. But there’s other times when I just want to be so honest that people are like, “Yeah, that’s refreshingly honest and I would love to hear more.”
So that’s just a handful of the ones I have in my inbox. I would love to hear your favorite email subject lines. If you’ve gotten emails that have really landed for you, if you’re collecting them, let’s keep sharing them. Come on over to Instagram, come to the comments and tell me so that everybody can see and I’ll try to share more here as well as they come in. If you want to send them in to my DMs on Instagram or again, post them in the comments. But I think that there’s so many creative people out there with great ideas.
I am game for you just stealing any of my subject lines that you like. Make sure when it’s other people that you feel good about making it enough your own that you’re not just directly plagiarizing people. But get ideas from what’s working for others. That’s how we do it as marketers, that’s how we do. Alright, thanks for joining me today. Again, if you want to join me for Nail Your Offer, don’t forget to go to jodymoore.com/nailyouroffer. Let’s nail your offer. I’ll see you there. Take care, everyone. Bye.
If you are a coach, healer or expert who is not yet making six figures, or not sure you’re set up properly to grow to seven figures and beyond, go take my free training. It’s at jodysfree-training.com. I’ll see you there.
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