eMail Marketing – subject line length

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As the saying goes, “there’s nothing as constant as change” especially in marketing. Every now and then I have an epiphany and realize that I am blindly following a rule that I learned in the distant past. (In marketing the distant past is anything longer than six months ago.)

Some rules are made to be broken – or at least tested. Subject line length for your email marketing campaigns is one of them.

I Googled “subject line length” just to be sure the “experts” were still saying what I thought they were saying. Sure enough, most of them repeat the mantra “shorter is better.” 50 characters or less seems to be the common wisdom.

However, a few mavericks are starting to test longer subject lines, around 80 characters in length with some success. Certainly, they continue to put the most critical words up front in case the subject line is truncated in the receiver’s inbox. But, sometimes saying just a bit more in the subject line can impact the open rate.

Seems to be worth a try.