Feedback Management

5 Best Email Subject Line Strategies to Increase Response Rate

5 Best Email Subject Line Strategies to Increase Response Rate

How many unread emails do you have in your inbox? Around 500 or maybe more than that? But how many of those do you actually open without going through its subject line? Though the Email subject line seems a small part of your message, it acts as a gatekeeper of your email survey campaigns. No matter what all you've written in your Email Survey, your recipients will judge your email on the basis of the subject line. 

Although Convincing your respondents to open your email survey can be challenging enough. But a strong survey email subject line is what stands between you and your customers’ engagement. According to Chadwick martin bailey, 47% of email recipients decide whether to open an email or not based on a subject line alone. So, the open rate of your email survey depends on the quality and aptness of the subject line of your email survey.

A catchy subject line optimizes the performance of your email survey and grabs your customers' attention quickly. So, if you don’t let your email surveys go unanswered, then follow the below 5 effective strategies for creating solid subject lines for your email surveys.

5 Best Email Subject Line Strategies to Increase Response Rate

1. Generate Subject Line That Triggers Emotion

Just like your other email surveys, this survey also has no response?

That’s probably because most of those subject lines are cold and not smart enough to trigger any type of emotion in your respondents. Using emotional expressions like Empathy in the subject line can lead to more helping behaviour.

The more empathy you’ll demonstrate to your respondents, the more they will engage in your survey. When you packed your subject line with the punch of empathy, this makes your respondents feel that they can help others to make informed decisions about your company by responding to the survey.

Subject Lines that Triggers Emotion

  • Let's talk about improving your experience with us.
  • How can I make my restaurant a fantastic place for you?

2. Personalize Your Subject Line

"Need Customer Feedback Survey"

With such a boring and extremely robotic subject line, forget about the response, your recipients can spam your email. Don't forget that your audience is a person, so always approach or speak to them like a person.

Personalized email subject lines create a state of focus that captivates the reader's attention. Thus, this profound sense of focus in a survey environment can yield higher quality responses. According to Experian, personalized email subject lines had 29% higher unique open rates and 41% more click-through rates.

Pitch your customers individually. Don't send the same email survey to all your customers, always create customized subject lines that cater to an individual’s requirement. To achieve this, you can prepare segmented email lists based on the customers' concerns.

Personalized Subject Lines

  • James, how was your lunch at The Brunch Bar today?
  • Did you enjoy your shopping at Spencer's today, Molly?

3. Keep the Email Subject Line Short

Along with the quality, the quantity of the subject line also plays a crucial role in the success of your email survey. Another reason for emphasizing short email subject lines is that over 53% of emails were opened on mobile devices. Survey email subject lines need to be short that fit into app notifications. Concise and easy to understand email subject line can attract more customers to open the email.

2. Email Subject Line Strategies

Short Subject Lines

  • Did you enjoy dinner at our restaurant?
  • Would you recommend us to others?

4. Add a Question in the Subject Line

Posing a question in the subject line of your email survey is an outcome-driven practice. Questions always bring curiosity among readers and entice them to open the email. Especially, open-ended questions quickly grab readers’ attention. Make sure your question must be related to your survey’s topic. The question-based email subject lines work well for a product survey and help you to gain in-depth knowledge about the buying habits of your customers.

Question-Based Subject Lines

  • Have any suggestions for our restaurant?
  • Did we miss out on something in serving you?

5. Add a Sense of Urgency to Your Subject Line

Your respondents might not respond quickly to your survey until and unless you don't tell them about time constraints. To get a quick response, you can add a sense of urgency to the subject line by adding a simple expression like “Now”.

1. Email Subject Line Strategies

Subject Lines that Show Urgency

  • You’ve got ONE DAY to fill survey
  • You’re missing out on something really important. 

Wrap Up 

The key tips we have outlined above can help you to gain in-depth understandability of the effectiveness of the subject line type. So, choose the nature of the subject lines according to your audience and their concern.

Apart from the subject line, you need to make your survey and feedback forms more relevant that can easily attract your customers to open it. For this, you can also customize your email surveys, send the embedded question in email surveys and lots more using Email Survey Software.

Have other survey email subject line tips to share? Share them in the comments below!

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Published on Nov 01, 2019. Updated on Mar 21, 2022.



Archit

Written by Archit

Nov 01, 2019

Experienced Content Writer and Strategist, been in the IT industry for the last 7 years. Associated with the Zonka Feedback. Passionate about writing customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer feedback, and Net Promoter Score.

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