4 Key Subject Line Trends Driven by Mobile and Social

After your sender name, your subject line has the biggest impact on whether subscribers open your emails or not. Here are four key subject line trends to keep in mind during 2015:

1. Mobile continues to shorten subject lines. Because mobile devices display fewer characters of a subject line than their webmail and desktop email client counterparts, the growth of mobile email reading is putting downward pressure on subject line lengths.

2. Snippet text becomes increasingly important “second subject line.” Counter-balancing shrinking subject lines is the fact that more subscribers are able to see snippet text, which gives subscribers a preview of the content of the email and appears next to or underneath the subject line in the inbox view of the native iPhone email app, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and other email clients. For instance, the native iPhone email app displays around 80 characters of snippet text, more than twice the number of characters that it displays of a subject line.

3. More images appear in subject lines. Subject lines aren’t limited to text anymore. Starting in 2012, there was good support for special characters like hearts, stars, and arrows. And now the native iPhone email app, Outlook.com, and other email clients support emojis. Currently around 2% of B2C subject lines include special characters or emojis.

4. More hashtags appear in subject lines. In the age of omni-channel campaigns, hashtags in subject lines connect email campaigns with social media campaigns. Often, using a hashtag in a subject line sacrifices a small percentage of opens in exchange for driving more social activity, so they should be used thoughtfully—and they tend to be. Currently, well under 1% of B2C subject lines include hashtags.

>> Read the entire post on the Salesforce blog

>> And for more on trends, check out 100 Inspiring Subject Lines from 2006 to 2014