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What makes a cold email subject line work?
Subject lines matter less than most people think and in a different way than expected. The job is not to be compelling. It is to look like ordinary correspondence rather than marketing.
What works
The best performing cold subject lines share a few characteristics.
- Short. Two to five words often outperforms a full sentence.
- Lowercase or sentence case rather than Title Case, which reads as marketing.
- Specific to the recipient or their company rather than generic.
- Plain and slightly mundane, like something a colleague would send.
- No punctuation theatrics, no emoji, no exclamation marks.
What does not work
Curiosity bait, urgency, and anything that sounds like a campaign. These raise open rates occasionally and reply rates almost never, because the opener immediately realises they have been tricked.
Fake reply prefixes such as adding RE: to a first contact are worse than ineffective. They are deceptive, they annoy people, and under CAN-SPAM and UK rules a misleading subject line is a compliance problem.
What actually drives replies
The first line of the message body, not the subject. Once opened, whether someone replies depends on whether the message is obviously relevant to them within a sentence or two.
Spending an hour on subject lines while sending a generic body is the wrong way round.
Still stuck, or want to know how this applies to your business? Ask us and a person will answer.
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