Nonetheless, it got me thinking about email subject lines.
For example, the CSS-Tricks Newsletter has this subject line exactly every single week:
📝 This Week in Web Design and Development
That’s maybe a missed opportunity. Every week I could hand-craft it instead focusing in on a particularly dramatic thing in the newsletter. Stephanie Burns, interviewing Sara Anna Powers, called it “Leveraging Curiosity”, which does make sense to me.
This week our newsletter opened with a bit about a Slideout Footer. So why not just say that in the subject line? It might pique some curiosity, give people immediate context, and make it more searchable later. Sounds good to me.
Our newsletter is is RSS-powered and goes out through MailChimp. MailChimp allows “Merge Tags” in the email subject line, so I can set it up like…
The RSS title will be the title of the content, so this week, I’ll try having a fancier title than we normally do.
I can check the data after sending, but I’m not sure if I’ll care that much about the data. If it comes across in email OK, I think it’s an improvement no matter what.