Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:31 pm

As a small business owner if you are like me you probably send and receive many emails during the day but have you ever thought about the importance of the subject line when you send emails to clients and prospects.

Listed below are 7 simple tips that will help make your emails more effective by encouraging people to actually open the emails when they receive them, especially if the recipient doesn’t use a preview window on their email client (outlook and Windows mail for example allow you to turn off the preview pane and many people do so to reduce the risk of some types of virus).

• Try not to use words such as “free”, “special offer”, “buy now” etc as these are often found in spam emails and may even lead to your carefully crafted email getting caught by spam filters or ending up in junk email boxes.
• For the same reason don’t use too many capitals in the subject, even if you get past the spam filters many people will ignore emails with such subjects.
• Keep it simple and short – research has shown that anything over 40-45 characters leads to lower “opening rates” than shorter subject lines.  However make sure that the subject is meaningful – I got an email today with the subject “Budget Burn” in which the sender was trying to get me to spend any unspent budget on their products – the subject in this case didn’t encourage me to open the email.
• If there is an offer in the email then try to mention it in the subject line so that the recipient knows what to expect.
• Try to personalise the subject by including the recipients name, although you have to make sure that your marketing database is accurate  in this case (and work out what you will do if there is no name in the database)
• Use numbers – for example if I were to email people about this blog post I would want to make sure that I used “7 tips…” rather than just “how to create effective email subject lines”.
• Do not use misleading subjects – doing so will at the very least lead to people unsubscribing from your mailing list and at worse could result in people complaining to organisations such as the advertising standards authority.

So there you have it, 7 simple tips on how to improve your email subject lines and encourage people to actually open the emails.  If you stop to think about the emails you have received today you may find that like me you get many but only open a few – analyse what it is about the few that you open and you may find that they follow the suggestions above.