170 Best Email Subject Lines of 2017

by | Nov 21, 2017 | Articles, Content Marketing

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I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters. (As of this writing, I have 256,918 unread emails in my inbox.) While I don’t read all of these emails, I do scan them all, so I can find the best email subject lines. As a digital marketer, it is really useful to listen to what the masters of content marketing are doing, en masse. Every day as I sift through my email, I notice what grabs my attention. When an email subject line stands out in my inbox, I know there is something that it can teach me.

All year, I have been tagging the best email subject lines that catch my attention, and below is a list of the 170 best email subject lines that I saved. The author of the subject line is linked next to each one, so if you like, you can subscribe to their email newsletters, and follow the masters that I follow.

Table of Contents

22 Webinar Invitation Subject Lines

These subject lines ask your email subscriber to register for an upcoming webinar. Webinars are fantastic for creating rapport and delivering mini-campaigns that increase engagement.

8 Best Customer Survey Email Subject Line Examples

Getting feedback from your customers gives you invaluable marketing intelligence. (If you’ve got a website, btw, I’d love to know your thoughts in this 2-minute survey.) Getting your list to open the survey request is step 1, and a few different techniques are shown below. Coupons work well.

12 Good Email Subject Lines for Lead Magnets

These are the best email subject lines for getting opt-ins for a new list. If you want to develop a segment of your existing list, or clean your list so you can identify the people who are willing to re-subscribe, these subject lines will get your existing subscribers to opt-in again.

9 Re-Engagement Email Subject Lines

Sometimes, your open rate lies to you. Open rates are notoriously inaccurate, but they are still used to determine the level of engagement of your list – which can be factored into the likelihood you will land in Gmail’s Propmotions tab, or in the Spam folder. To keep your list engaged, you need to both produce compelling content, and check in with your subscribers regularly to see if they still want to be on your list.

21 Best Email Subject Lines for Sales

Email is for selling. Out of every method of selling things on the Internet, email is still the #1 driver of sales. Improving your open rate on your sales emails through a good subject line is probably the most granular thing you could improve to increase your revenue. Pay special attention to how people are selling with the best email subject lines, and you can increase your own sales as a result.

16 Post-Product Launch Email Subject Lines

These emails are sent after a product launch. If your product launch has a sales funnel, with a lead magnet at the top of it, or if you had a waitlist, then you have an additional group of people to market your product to during launch.  After launching your product, it’s good to keep communicating to this hot list with all the benefits of your product – the extra bonuses, the expiring offer, and the testimonials of people whose lives have been changed because of what you’re launching. The best email subject lines will help get those emails opened.

10 Subject Lines For Affiliate Offers

These emails were sent to promote another person’s product (or lead magnet) and they do a good job of creating interest, offering solutions to a pressing problem, and standing out in the inbox.

9 Great Blog Post Announcements

Announcing a blog post can get very pedestrian – or it could be an opportunity to showcase your great headline writing skills.

  • New post: 47 Resources for People Who Love to Write but Can Never Find the Time – Jon Morrow
  • What my vacation face-plant can teach you about success  – Marie Forleo
  • Are successful people crazy? Benji Bruce – Speaking Lifestyle
  • ✪ The Cardinal Sin of Self-publishing ✪ – Derek Murphy
  • 7 Questions You Have About RE-Launching a Product – Answered! – Bailey Richert
  • Did you miss this episode? Tim Ferriss
  • 5 Unusual Ways to Get Paid Doing What You Love (Even If You’re Not an Expert Yet!) – Live Your Legend Team
  • New Episode: Do you want to hear a joke? – Dr. Fab Mancini
  • My podcast launches today! – Noah Kagan

38 Email Subject Lines That Intrigue

The best emails in a crowded inbox can create a ‘pattern interrupt’ – something that makes you curious enough to stop what you are doing and actually pay attention. The best pattern interrupts are usually shocking in some way, making them stand out from the noise. These are the ones that caught my attention this year.

16 Email Marketing Subject Lines for Email Marketers

Many of the lists I subscribe to are about email marketing, since I spend a lot of my time marketing through email. These are the best email subject lines that don’t fit in the other categories on this page, but are of particular interest to people who work with email as their craft.

9 Welcome Email Subject Lines For New Customers

When engaging new clients on your list, getting them involved immediately is a great way to increase retention. A good onboarding sequence starts with an introductory email that gets opened.

Bonus Tip: Subscribe to Email Newsletters in ALL CAPS

You may have noticed that some of the best email subject lines listed above address the name CAELAN in all caps.

This is because I make it a practice to always subscribe for newsletters with CAELAN as my first name. I can easily pick out who is using a first-name parameter in their email, and who is actually addressing me personally, by the capitalization of my first name in the email.

Some people have a specific email address they use for email subscriptions, so they can corral them all into one inbox, and only check it when they want to. Personally, I like having everyone’s email newsletters crowding my personal inbox. I even disabled the ‘Promotions’ tab in Gmail so I can get an unfiltered firehose of communication anytime I check my inbox.

Whenever something stands out from that noise, I know that it matters.

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

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