Hey, Are you using Klaviyo for marketing automation and struggling with low open rates with your emails?
And despite reaching subscribers’ inboxes perfectly getting ignored like a passing air?
Ultimately causing low customer interactions, a poor engagement ratio, and a decline in conversion rates. In short, email campaign failure.
Now, how can we prevent this?
To be honest, there is no magical stick that when applied will boost open rates immediately, but when we are dealing particularly with low open rates, two factors highly need to be considered —the “subject line” and the second one is “customer’s relation with the brand.”
There are so many strategies you can apply in your subject line which we will discuss later in this article. For instance, you can have these quick notes in your mind.
Your subject line should be;
- Short, Personalized, and Relevant to your audience.
- No clickbait, be ethical
- You can incorporate psychological elements into your subject line as well.
Customer’s relations with the brand must be;
- Pure
- There must be a positive perception of your brand in the market.
Fortunately, Klaviyo has various tools to help you in crafting an effective subject line that’ll not only improve open rate but can also lead to better conversions.
So kindly stick around till the end, as I’ll be sharing really helpful and practical tips on how you can use Klaviyo at its full potential to craft an optimized subject line.
The Importance of Subject Lines.
Why Do Subject Lines Matter?
You might’ve noticed, that nowadays we’re just skimming through the sentences rather than reading completely, so it’s advisable to have a strong, clear, and concise, and relevant subject embedded with certain psychological tricks to increase open rates.
The impact of subject lines on open rates and overall email performance.
Let’s keep it simple: If your subject line is not optimized then there is only one possibility that can occur: a decline in open rates.
Therefore what’s essential here is identifying the factors that are causing this phenomenon.
Figure out, what the factors causing low open rates. Is your subject very broad or sounding like a scam? Are your subscribers able to relate to it or not? Is your subject line so sales that people, after reading it, choose to stay away?
Similarly, there are various such factors playing their role in backend, causing a negative impact on open rates and overall email campaign.
Without figuring out what the actual faults are, you will not be able to design or optimize the subject line most effectively.
Optimising the subject line is not just about rephrasing its word and making it exciting but is more about knowing where the main crack is and then cementing it accordingly. Only after this can you hope for better results.
Do’s and Don’ts in the Subject Line
While crafting a subject line marketers often willingly or unwillingly end up doing lots of things that they’re not supposed to do.
Which either creates a negative impression on subscribers or gets hit by the spam filter.
There’s no doubt that email marketing has more ROI compared to its alternatives.
However, to avail such high ROI one must follow fair practices, and ethical and legal approaches while designing subjects line for their campaigns.
lets have a look on what you can do and what you shouldn’t with respect to the subject line.
| Do’s | Don’t |
|---|---|
| Simple, Clear & Concise | Complex Or Jargon |
| Emojis and Humour | Overly Promotional or salesy |
| Personalized and Relevant | All words Capitalisation |
| Psychological & Emotional Triggers | Excessive Punctuation |
| Highliy Targeted towards customers | False Promises |
| Honest | Clickbait |
| Highlight Benefits, USP | Very lengthy sentences |
| Incorporate brand voice | Spam triggering words |
| Include Data Or Numbers | Randomly targeted |
| Leverage Scarcity | Avoid getting to vague |
| Use Action triggering verbs | Avoid Negative language |
| Showcase Exclusivity | Don’t be so formal |
| Leverage Seasonal Occasions | Don’t ignore timing and proper segmentation |
| Mention Time Frame | Avoid to many clutter |
| Adding name of subscribers | Don’t ignore grammar |
| Use Power words | Don’t Ignore Preheader Text |
| Ask Question | Using special character |
| Provide Solutions or Tips | Avoid one word or meaningless subject |
| offering Rewards | Overusing Emojis |
| Include the recent behavior of the customer | Don’t ignore A/B test and mobile friendliness |
This table will provide a generic overview of- how a subject line should be.
However, when we practically plan to design a subject line, we need to think more strategically.
It involves dynamic and creative processes which further needs a lot of experiments, tests, and optimisation accordingly.
This process totally revolves around potential customer’s.
Therefore, In my opinion, the first step should be to know and understand your customers/ subscribers.
Keep an eye on their behavior, try to hold their nerves —Who are they? What are they? What do they want? How do they want? What do they love? their problem, basically everything, but from the business/shop owners’ point of view.
Even Klaviyo understands the importance of customer data.
Therefore it offers various useful tools to track your customers’ behavior.
Plus it also provides a way through which customers can communicate or share their ideas, feedback, reviews, problems, and so on.. with businesses.
This data, if used correctly, can act as a mentor that will guide businesses in designing the most ideal products or services for their customers, ensuring customer satisfaction and enhancing overall relations.
More importantly, it will also help in crafting a strong, effective, and relevant subject line which is why we all are here.
So knowing your potential prospects is a must to craft catchy subjects.
Overview of Klaviyo’s Subject Line Tools
Firstly, start viewing Klaviyo as more than just a basic email-sending platform. It offers a wide range of functionalities, features, and tools beyond email marketing.
To be fair, we cannot craft a strong subject line just from scratch, but we can come up with an effective subject line after going through a few experiments, tests, and hopefully optimization.
Fortunately, Klaviyo is the best platform where you can carry out these dynamic experiments with your subject line, so you can come up with the most significant one for your campaigns.
Key Features of subject line tool
Benefits of Klaviyo’s subject line tools
This will help you generate an engaging subject line based on the theme and goal of your email. For someone, who’s new to email copywriting and finding it tough to curate a catchy subject, this feature is great. Unfortunately, if you are not happy with the output generated by AI, you can easily modify it in a way you prefer.
What I feel is that, you should leverage the power of AI, as they are well-trained to perform specific tasks and have access to lots of data. AI processes all this data to provide us with the best solution for our needs. Therefore, giving them at least one try in every sphere would be a fair delivery.
This tool also analyses all the campaigns that you’ve run in the past 90 days for a similar segment of people and pulls out the best-performing subject line ( based on open rates), which you can use in the next campaign while targeting a similar set of customers.
Additionally, it also offers A/B testing to find out which subject line has the most potential.
Leveraging Klaviyo’s customer data collection and predictive analytic features in crafting personalized subject line.
To create the most personalized and relevant subject line we need to track customer’s every movement on our site.
Klaviyos’ advanced mechanism lets you track the entire journey of your customer’s like, When they first visited the site? What products were they looking for? Their abandoned cart history and many more.
Now, you may say all this data is based on past behaviour and may not be applicable in the present time. Then let me tell you, Klaviyo also grabs real-time data based on the most recent activities of your visitors. Plus, its predictive analysis features provide future scripts about your visitors, like when you can expect the next order from them and what it can be.
Crafting effective subject line to boost Email Open Rates in Klaviyo
Without wasting much time on fluff, let’s just directly dive into the flow that you can follow to craft a compelling hook for your subject line.
1. Know your Audience/Subscribers
Here, understanding your audience means the people who are already present in your email list. We have to analyse these profiles in particular and not outside of the email list.
However, you can relate this profile with those who have not joined your email list yet but have lots of similarities in common; such as all are into modelling, fashion designing or are fitness enthusiast or pet lovers or biker and so on.
They can be anyone but must be ideally fit to become your customer.
So, How can you get a clear horoscope of your customer?
By Klaviyos Profile Generating and Precise Segmentation feature—
Recognising the importance of customer info ; Klaviyo has made the process easy for us. Its built-in CDP and CRM functionality, provides detailed insights about our customer’s journey with our business. It tracks each and every step of visitors on the website and this data keeps updating best on users’ latest interaction (real time) within your website.
Example: If any of your customers view any product; let’s say a diamond ring for his girlfriend in your online store. Then, this behaviour will get recorded and will get reflected in the profile section of that particular customer. This is applicable on all the individuals who engage with your online store.
In this way you can come more close to your subscribers just like a friend. And, you will be able to grab every moment of them.
This makes it easy for you to understand; what they are looking for or interested in. This data can later be used in creating the most precise and personalised segment as well as a subject line for your audience. By doing this, they will feel, “oh this is what I was looking for yesterday!
This may increase the chances of opening the email.
For example – If someone Is searching for a birthday gift for his girlfriend – by this you can easily guess a probable overview about, who and how your ideal customer is?
Ways to be in touch with your audience to know them better
What data should I collect from customers?
5 prominent types of custom data can be very useful in offering highly personalized and relevant products to customers which are as follows.
- Demographic Details
- Psychographic Info
- Behavior Info
- From Marketing Perspective
- Other useful data
2. Personalisation Tactics
Personalisation is not just limited to adding first and last name in the subject line, it’s beyond that.
The more personalised and relevant a subject line sounds to a reader the more chances are that he’ll interact with it.
How can you make the subject line personalised?
Simply by utilising the data which you’ve collected while doing research about your customers.
Especially, when it comes to E-Commerce email marketing incorporating the name of your customers in the subject line is not alone enough to entice someone to open your email.
Even I do also receive tons of emails from E-Commerce brands, stating my name in the subject line, offering enticing deals and discounts, still it’s not enough to convince me to open the email.
Because I already know what’s there in the email and what’s the main motive behind sending that email to me. Obviously, they are trying to sell me something.
And, this is what being a common man I hate. I don’t like someone trying to sell me something when there is no intention of buying it at that moment.
Yes, timing is a crucial factor that must be considered while presenting any offer in front of your customer.
When we say personalization there is no space left for randomization.
You have to figure out the right time to send the email so that customers won’t leave it without opening it.
How to identify the right time for sending emails?
The right timing is when they’re looking for something to buy. Klaviyo can easily provide this information as it tracks visitor’s every movement in your store, especially, search and view history, wishlist, abandonment details, and much more. With this data, you can easily predict the most ideal time to send the next email.
3. Utilising emotional & Psychological words
You can use some powerful words to make your subject line more attention grabbing.
For this you can also use AI tools to craft strong hook based on personal traits of your audience.
AI tools like, ChatGPT, Google Bard can help you with this.
For transforming your subject line into a strong hook you can apply the following tone.
- Curiosity & urgency
- Emojis & questions
- Numbers, facts & data
- Fomo
- Benefits & USP’s
- Testimonial
- Social Proof, Customer stories
- Problem, Pains & challenges
- Latest deals
- Specificity
- And, please make sure to optimize the preview test as it gives the second tease to open the email.
4. Performing A/B Testing
In a world of email marketing, running an A/B test is a secret tool to optimise an email campaign in a more effective way.
By performing A/B test you can obtain a perfect working formula for your subject line. Which can bring a significant engagement and conversions.
A/B testing involves sending two versions of emails to test their performance, to see which performs better in terms of open rates, CTR, conversions, and so on.
As here we are particularly focusing on the open rates we can test different forms of subject line.
For Example:
5. Preventing email from going in spam folder
Some words can cause your emails to get blocked by spam filters, so we need to avoid certain words in our subject line that can cause this issue.
To know what words you should avoid in your subject line; you can check out the list of 188 Spam Words to Avoid by ActiveCampaign.
If you want to know more about how to prevent your emails from going into spam folder you can check out this guide provided by Klaviyo.
Final Thought
Marketing is a purely volatile game and you will definitely experience up’s and down in the performance of your campaigns.
Therefore, it is necessary to adapt new strategies and implement new ways time to time to be in the profitable zone and always try to follow a data-driven approach rather than going for guesswork.
