Create Email Subject Lines Sure to Get Your Prospecting Emails Opened

While I don’t recommend cold email marketing to attorney-prospects, all Certified Legal Nurse Consultants should use prospecting email as a marketing strategy for attorneys identified through networking and referral. The friend or colleague that attorney knows has essentially opened the door to get your emails opened.

One research study revealed that up to 31% of marketing emails from consultants get opened. However, the secret to get attorney-prospects opening your emails starts with the subject line. Put another way, if your subject line fails, then your email is most likely never going to be read. This is why it’s important that you master the art of email subject line writing. Use these 5 strategies for creating irresistible subject lines sure to be opened.

1. Write the subject line as a headline. Email marketing, like a strong advertisement, demands a headline to capture the attorneys’ attention. With a strong subject line the response you want to elicit is I’ve got to read more.
   Example: Attorney Divulges Secret Defense Weapon
2. Embrace clarity over cleverness. An Aweber Communications study revealed that a clear email subject line is a whopping 541% more likely to be opened over one that tries to use “clever” language. That’s right, just by ensuring that the attorney-prospect understands the contents of your email, they are exponentially more likely to open your message. Pretty cool, huh? Attorneys are crazy busy, and they don’t have the time to try to figure out why you may be contacting them, so make it crystal clear and you’ll enjoy more email marketing success.
   Example: 5 Ways I Can Help You Win More Legal Cases works better than 5 Sneaky Ways to Win More Legal Cases
   
3. Focus on the benefit of your CLNC^® services to the attorney-prospect. For example, if you want to highlight locating MD expert witnesses in the body of your email, the subject line How to Get Reputable MDs to Say Yes to Testifying is focusing on the benefit because every attorney has had a strong potential MD expert say no.
4. Keep it short. With the prevalence of mobile, more and more attorneys are checking their email on their smartphones. This means you’ll want to consider optimizing your email subject line so that it doesn’t get overly truncated when your attorney-prospect scans his inbox. Email marketing platform provider ExactTarget recommends that email subject lines in general are no longer than 50 characters. If you believe that the attorneys you are targeting are using smartphones for their email, you might be better off keeping the character count under 40.
   Example: The Email to Get MD Experts to Say Yes
5. Personalize it. Sending out canned email subject lines? Forget it! It’s time for you to get personal. According to Experian’s 2013 Email Market Study, emails with personalized subject lines boast a 26% higher open rate than their non-personalized counterparts. So if you can speak to something specific that your target attorney-prospect cares about, or if you can even just use the word “your” in your subject line, you’ll most likely have greater outreach success.
   Example: Increase Your Oncology Medical Malpractice Settlements

Finally, here’s the hard part – once they’ve opened your email the body and content have to be compelling to make them want to click through. But that’s a subject for another blog.

Become as good an expert in email subject lines as you are in nursing and soon you’ll be cashing in on huge financial benefits.

I’m Just Writin’

P.S. Comment here and share your most compelling or successful email marketing subject line(s).

P.P.S. Thanks to Digital Marketing Now for contributing to this blog.