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The power of vague and specific subject lines to increase your email open rates

When to tell them everything and when to keep them guessing

Mike Holden
3 min readApr 26, 2020
Photo by Cytonn Photography on Unsplash

It’s a fine line. Go one direction and risk losing the trust of your audience. Go another and they might not open your email, making the assumption they already know what’s in it. Get it right and you might hit engagement gold.

Being vague or specific in your email marketing subject lines, depending on what you’re looking to accomplish, can have an impact on your open rates. Give me three minutes and I’ll explain.

Experimenting with your subject lines

Sometimes you have something very specific and timely you want to tell your audience, like “25% off sale ends today” or “Registration is now open.” The best way to drive up your open rate in these cases is often for your subject line to state exactly what the big news is. If it’s urgent, leverage that.

At other times, your audience might already know you have a big sale going on, or that registration is open, because you’ve told them about it. Or, you might have something completely different to talk to them about and, in some cases, it might be less exciting or urgent than other things you’ve sent. But, you still need people to open your…

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Mike Holden
Mike Holden

Written by Mike Holden

Get ideas for marketing without a large budget in my newsletter, No Budget Marketing. https://nobudget.beehiiv.com/

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