Guest article written by Kevin A. McGrail, cloud fellow and principal evangelist for Dito
A few weeks ago, I did two panels at Inbox Expo. I also did some recorded AI prompt engineering demos for a customer. As a follow-up, I thought a quick blog might be interesting to show this prompt demo for AI. It helps answer, “How to use AI to Quickly Improve your Subject Line to Create More Effective Social Media and Email Campaigns.”
To set the stage for a quick 6 minute video, I knew I wanted some foundational information. Luckily, Dela Quist’s subject line research would be a great way to kick things off.
I hope you like this short video and below is the outline as well!
Look forward to seeing you at the next Inbox Expo! In the meantime, I’ll be speaking at MailCon on July 28 and if you need help with anything Google or email security related, let me know! On behalf of Dito and RaptorEmailSecurity, thanks.
#KAM
My Outline
The term more effective is a very subjective term so for this example, I will focus on using data and learnings from Mr. Dela Quist who was the creator of SubjectLinePro. This is an excellent product you might consider using but for today, let’s talk about some of the science.
#1 The shorter the subject line, the more opens you will get
#2 You get more clicks with longer subjects.
If you use subjects with meaning, you are conveying more information.
So for example, “Sale Today” or “Oops”, might get more opens.
There’s a lot of reasons why: Inbox Zero people like myself will open it or others will open it due to FOMO and the ambiguity.
However, “50% off of sneakers, tees, and socks starting at 4PM tonight” wll only get opened by people who want those sales items. In short, we’ve used the subject to pre-qualify the lead and therefore will get a lower open rate but potentially a higher click through rate / conversion rate.
Each has their purpose. For example, branding might just want more eyeballs whereas sales & marketing wants more conversions. Only you can decide what your goal is.
Dela has another simple rule in Subject Lines: We respond to change as individuals.
Dela found a 14% lift in the rates just by using a different subject. That change can be a one word change or adding an emoji or referencing an offer.
This is especially important if you are mailing people over a period of time where you need to mix up/out/in your subject lines.
Additionally, he says to avoid the dead spot of 40-60 character long subjects because you don’t stand out!. Mix it up. Go longer or shorter for higher open rates and use relevant, longer content for more click through conversions.
Creating these subjects with these differences is as simple as creating a few Subject Lines using the Help Me Write Feature in Google Docs. For example, ask Gemini to, “create me a subject for an email for a BOGO sale on Sneakers, T-Shirts, and Dress Shirts that is approximately 70 characters long with at least two emojis.”
Add in the science of tracking your open and conversion rates and you can really use Gemini to quickly and creatively achieve more effective posts and email campaigns.
Of course, you can also use Gemini’s Help You Write your post or email content better with the Tone, Refinement, Summarize, Bulletize, Shorter, Elaborate, and Rephrase features too.
