Using mathematical or scientific methods to craft your business’ email subject lines is obviously better than sitting at your desk and thinking to yourself “..kittens. Everybody loves kittens. Kittens will be my subject line!” Not only will kittens be misleading (unless of course you deal in the kitten trade), people will be so disappointed that there are no kittens in the email that they’ll immediately unsubscribe and mark you as SPAM.
So if your brain can’t create the catchy titles, how do you grab your customer’s attention when sending emails? A couple of blogs have already mentioned this Google gadget, so I decided to check it out for myself: Google’s Wonder Wheel! It’s hidden under the ‘Web + Show Options’ tab and helps you create a map of key words.
To see how it could help me when I make our client’s emails, I first Googled ‘filing cabinets’ (because how can you make that exciting?), which gave me an array of other options such as ‘lateral filing cabinets’ and ‘discount filing cabinets’. I decided to go with the ‘discount’ which gave me even more closely related subjects.
So now what? Now you take it into Google’s other nifty tool AdWords. Once you type in your word or phrase, you’ll get a whole list with a green bar next to each related word. The ones with the most green, or biggest numbers for Local Search and Global Search, are the most searched-for phrases. This is where it comes together – those key words are what you’ll want to populate your email subject lines with. If I was designing an email to draw in people that may be interested in filing cabinets, I could try “Office Furniture at Discount Prices” or “Office Furniture Coupon”. Those subject lines don’t exclude customers that may already own a great filing cabinet, but need a new office chair, and who doesn’t love discounts (of course you need to actually have a discount or a coupon offering in your email, otherwise you won’t be CAN-SPAM compliant, but you get the idea).
Try out a few with an A/B test to see what works best. Now you have a catchy email subject line that people will want to open! Even if you aren’t offering kittens.
