You may not be giving enough thought to your email subject lines if you think their sole purpose is to get your email opened. In this short piece from Email Marketing Reports, Mark Brownlow explains the three jobs subject lines perform.

Subject Line Objectives

You can’t set about writing a subject line until you know what that subject line should achieve. You would probably say something like, “The subject line should get people to open the email.”

Yes. And no.

Recognition. Interest. Action.

If that’s all there is to it, you’d see more subject lines like these:

Your last purchase has a dangerous defect
We overbilled you, $100 gift voucher enclosed
We sold your credit card data by accident

Clearly, just getting people to “open the email” isn’t your real purpose. Instead, your subject line is looking to generate RIA: Recognition, Interest, Action.

That’s NOT the same as getting people to open up an email.

Recognition

People need to recognize that the email comes from you and is something they’re comfortable receiving.

Why? First, because any email they don’t recognize is likely to get ignored, deleted or (worst of all) reported as spam.

Second, if they recognize the email, then all the positive expectations and experiences you built up through your brand, website, welcome emails or past email campaigns now come into play and encourage the reader to explore further.

Various bits of an email campaign contribute to recognition, but the top three are sender name, subject line and what you put at the top of the content (the part that likely appears in preview panes).

So the subject line must contribute to recognition.

Interest

This is your “getting people to open” part. Most recipients are scanning down the subject lines in their inbox and subconsciously asking the same question as they pass each one:

Is it worth looking at what’s in this email now?

Your subject line needs to give them a reason to answer that question with a yes.

But there’s a second point. The interest you generate must be rewarded by the actual content of the email. You want to raise expectations that you can meet (or exceed). You don’t want to raise expectations and then disappoint.

Which is why deceptive subject lines are out (and usually illegal anyway) and why vague or teasing subjects need careful handling, as we’ll see later in the series.

Action

The ultimate goal of your emails is not to get people to look at them, but to get them to take some kind of action: a click, a purchase, a reply, a download, whatever.

The primary aims of the subject line are to create recognition and interest. But it can also pave the way for the action you’re looking for.

The right subject line can, for example, help create a sense of urgency, desire, curiosity etc., all of which are the first spark in the thought process that ends with a click on the right button or link.

You have to be careful here, though. You don’t want to weaken the subject line’s capacity to reach the other objectives by going for a hard sell right away. As a recent MarketingExperiments report on compelling headlines concluded:

The objective of your headline is not to sell, but to connect with your reader…when we’re focused on the end result, we tend to ask headlines to do too much – and run the risk of overshooting the mark.

Recognition. Interest. Action.