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Email marketing campaign subject lines are typically the determining factor of whether the recipient opens your message, so you better make it good. While subject lines are amongst the most widely tested component of an email marketing message, what works for one company doesn’t necessarily work for the next.

Furthermore, deriving a long-term methodology out of a single subject line test is a dangerous course of action. Are you forever going to include your company name at the front of your subject lines? It may work for the time being, but the effectiveness may diminish over time.

Rather than taking your learnings and automatically applying them to all of your email marketing campaign subject lines, the most effective strategy is to test in real-time to determine what the right subject line is for one specific message at a given moment in time.

Here are a few experiments you may want to conduct when testing subject lines for your email marketing campaigns:

Length
Typically shorter subject lines – 35 characters or less (including spaces) – perform better, but that is not always true. There are some brands that have found longer, more specific subject lines perform better. It is believed that success has more to do with what you are saying and not how many characters in which you say it.

Actionable vs. Informative
Typically there are two approaches to creating subject lines: informative vs. engaging. Informative styles tell readers what the email is about, which largely entails nouns. Actionable subject lines engage readers with questions and appeals to take action, using verbs and commands. Experiment with both to determine the best subject line for each message that you send.

Summary of Message Content
Sum up the message content with the email’s most compelling feature, top story or other information that signals the reader to open it. A new product or service offering may not be compelling enough. What is it about the product or service that is enticing? Instead of “[Brand] paints on sale,” try something like “Create stunning kitchen looks with [Brand] paints.”

Activity of Others
Pay attention to the searches run on your website and the organic searches from search engines – and consider using words from the most popular searches in your subject lines. Also, mine the subject lines of your closest competitors for ideas for words and phrasings. You can also take note of headlines used by newspapers and magazines, especially in their online editions, which some are now optimizing for search.

When you are testing subject lines, stick to the best practice of keeping it concise and clearly indicating the purpose and content of your message. And again, test repeatedly in real-time to achieve optimal email marketing results.