Writing a relevant and appealing email subject for your event

There are a num­ber of com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels at your dis­pos­al for pro­mot­ing your events. includ­ing online adver­tis­ing, web index­ing, social net­works, fly­ers, com­mu­ni­ca­tion by phone, and more. How­ev­er, the only one that is essen­tial for estab­lish­ing a long-term rela­tion­ship with your atten­dees is email.

When announc­ing your event by email or send­ing invi­ta­tions direct­ly through this chan­nel, you need to ensure that recip­i­ents will open them. To improve your chances, your email’s sub­ject line must be well thought-out, as the read­er will make their deci­sion in a mat­ter of sec­onds, among a dozen oth­er emails of dif­fer­ent lev­els of sophis­ti­ca­tion.

Here are some tips for catch­ing the reader’s atten­tion from the first glance.

Sum­ma­ry

1. Under­stand the impor­tance of the sub­ject line
2. Mas­ter the essen­tials
3. Avoid the obvi­ous pit­falls

1. Understand the importance of the subject line

The importance of the subject line

It’s sta­tis­ti­cal­ly proven that 33% of recip­i­ents decide whether or not to open an email based sole­ly on its sub­ject.

On aver­age, peo­ple read 700 words per minute, where­as the length of an email sub­ject is only around 50 char­ac­ters. This means that you have only four sec­onds to engage your read­er. Four sec­onds… to make an attrac­tive and rel­e­vant offer.

Consider your audience

For any task relat­ed to writ­ing, it’s impor­tant to first of all con­sid­er the audi­ence. The sub­ject of an event invi­ta­tion email is no excep­tion. What inter­ests your audi­ence? What will they learn from read­ing your sub­ject line? Will it inter­est them and encour­age them to open the email and read it?

Define your writing tone

Read­ers are always more will­ing to open an email when the sub­ject is writ­ten with an orig­i­nal touch. If they think “anoth­er email ad” when they receive your email, you’ve lost.

If you word your sub­ject care­ful­ly, you will increase your chances of suc­cess.

Why are you sending this email?

This isn’t the time for being mys­te­ri­ous. You must be 100% clear about your aim and let cus­tomers know exact­ly what they’re open­ing. It’s all about cla-ri-ty!

2. Master the essentials

Use the recipient’s name

Peo­ple are always flat­tered when they read their name some­where. That doesn’t change when it comes to emails, even if the per­son knows that their first name hadn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly been typed let­ter by let­ter by a human.

Attract with action verbs

Make your recip­i­ents want to click by adding a call-to-action verb at the start of your sub­ject.

Make sure that your recipients feel privileged

These two exam­ples suc­cess­ful­ly illus­trate what makes some­one want to open an email:

• “An offer for you as a loy­al attendee of our event”
• “Invi­ta­tion to the pri­vate par­ty on 22 May”

Provide figures

Fig­ures talk — they allow peo­ple to assess and envis­age future ben­e­fits, and to see the big pic­ture. A good prac­tice is to use fig­ures in email sub­jects. Use them spar­ing­ly, and wise­ly!

Test several variations

You can’t rely on your own pre­dic­tions. A good way to test email sub­jects is to choose two real­ly dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions. Play around with all the ele­ments at your dis­pos­al, includ­ing val­ue, length, tone, con­tent, and so on.

Show these two ver­sions to two audi­ences of sim­i­lar sizes, and iden­ti­fy the one that has been most suc­cess­ful.

3. Avoid the obvious pitfalls

No false promises…

Nobody likes a liar. Def­i­nite­ly don’t try to encour­age your recip­i­ents to open an email by using false promis­es in the sub­ject. Bro­ken promis­es have con­se­quences. They may increase your open rate, but they will also increase the unsub­scribe rate for your email mar­ket­ing cam­paigns. Is this real­ly what you’re look­ing for?

… or too much extravagance

Cap­i­tal let­ters, punc­tu­a­tion and puns must be used spar­ing­ly. They often don’t do much, and at first glance remind recip­i­ents of spam emails.

Beware of length

An email sub­ject line will be cut off in the recipient’s inbox if it’s too long, espe­cial­ly on a smart­phone, so don’t exceed 50 char­ac­ters.

No more errors

Recip­i­ents won’t trust an event that sends emails whose sub­ject lines con­tain spelling or gram­mar mis­takes. Have at least two peo­ple proof­read what you’ve writ­ten.

Before we fin­ish, here are four exam­ples of rel­e­vant and appeal­ing email sub­jects for events:

• Free work­shop: 3 win­ning mar­ket­ing strate­gies
• Your invi­ta­tion to Pigalle’s Neigh­bours’ Day
• Only 24 hours left to sign up for our yoga class­es
• Mon­day 23: Span­ish speak­ers’ meet­ing at the Botan­ic Gar­den

As well as your emails’ sub­ject lines, opti­mis­ing your cam­paigns’ tar­get­ing and seg­men­ta­tion is essen­tial to their suc­cess. Our Mar­ket­ing and CRM tool, Weez­Tar­get, allows you to do this. Write to us by click­ing on the but­ton below to get the beta ver­sion of Weez­Tar­get now:

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