Our Top 3 Email Subjects of 2021

In this week’s blog post we are sharing with you our top three email subjects of 2021, based on email open rates. These are the subject lines that have made people click and want to read more.

It’s December and at this time of year we tend to get reflective. We look back at the goals we set for the year and see which ones we achieved, we think about why we didn’t achieve all of them and make plans and set goals for the next year.

One of the things we know we want to improve next year is our marketing. We are fairly good at it but there is definitely room for improvement, so we have been reviewing how well our emails have been performing and as part of this we looked at the titles of the emails that have the best open rate and we discovered that the top three all have one thing in common…

Here are our top three email subjects of 2021

We have also shared the open rate percentage for each email. Bear in mind that the average open rate for an email newsletter type email is 18%.

At Number 1:

Two awesome things, one not so awesome thing and a thank you.

Open rate: 32.3%

At Number 2:

The 6 essential branding photos every business owner needs and website goal setting.

Open rate: 30.1%

At Number 3:

4 lessons from the Social Media outage and we would love your thoughts.

Open rate: 28%

So, what do they all have in common? They have numbers in the titles.

We have spoken before about the power of numbers in titles, which is why we use them in our headings. It’s thought that people are more likely to want to read more when they see a number because they have a sense of what they are going to get or how much information there is going to be so they are more inclined to click.

We don’t use numbers in our headings every week, we like to vary it a bit but we do always give a sense of what is included in the email and the type of useful information people will get from reading it. Although, I find it interesting that our most read email has the most obscure title. My thoughts on this are that people are interested to hear about things going wrong, so are wondering what the “not to awesome thing” is and also people like to receive thanks.

All of our weekly email newsletters this year had an open rate of over 20% so we are doing better than average at keeping in people’s minds through our email marketing.

You may notice that next year we are using numbers in our email subject lines even more and I may experiment with sharing things that have gone wrong more as well, to see if my theory is right! So, if you are on our email list, make sure you keep an eye on your inbox to spot my subject line experiments! If you aren’t on our list you can subscribed to our blog here or sign up and receive one of our free resources here.