A Complete Guide to Email Subject Lines For Product Launches

Making a great first impression with any email newsletter is important, but this becomes vital when launching a new product. You can’t launch a product twice, so getting this right is key to ensuring you don’t waste this unique opportunity.

The email you send to launch a product is the perfect moment to introduce your brand and product, so using a punchy subject line to grab your followers' attention is crucial in ensuring a high open rate. 

In this guide, we’ll give you the lowdown on creating the best subject lines for a product launch. This will include the link between your subject line and your audience, some tips on how to craft a great subject line, how you can use emotion and authority to improve open rates, plus some information on A/B testing and common mistakes to avoid. 

Understanding Your Audience

Knowing your followers is essential in not only creating a great subject line but also crafting an email newsletter generally.

If you don’t understand what your audience wants or expects from your newsletters, it will be difficult to reach them personally making conversion tricky. Your newsletters won’t be relevant to them, and they’ll be unlikely to engage or convert.

So how can you identify your target audience’s pain points, goals, and preferences? Here are some quick tips:

• Social Media: Your social media channels are where your subscribers are most active and will hold information about your followers that will be key in creating a great subject line. Analyze your Facebook/Instagram/Twitter feeds to see what makes your subscribers tick.

• Data Analysis: By analyzing your customers’ past interactions with your business, you can figure out how to market to them in the future. Check out when they last purchased from you or how they interact with your company to analyze this data.

• Market Research: Some wider-level market research can be really helpful in understanding trends within your industry which could indicate what your subscribers are likely to expect from your business. Use market research tools to understand your customers better. 

• Talk To Your Customers: Perhaps a forgotten trade - don’t forget to speak to your customers to find out what it is they expect from you. Conducting surveys or feedback forms are a great way to do this; alternatively, you could reach out to them directly on social media via the comments section of your posts!

Crafting Subject Lines that Grab Attention

With over three billion newsletter campaigns sent from beehiiv alone (beehiiv stat), standing out in someone’s inbox is more important than ever. Your subject line needs to be eye-catching and relevant to your subscribers to ensure they open your product launch email.

Here are some key ways to craft compelling subject lines:

• Clarity: A subject line should be clear and concise. Most email systems don’t allow for a long subject line, so a short, to-the-point sentence in less than 50 characters will be far more punchy than something long and waffly.

• Personalization: Adding a personalized touch to a subject line is a great way of increasing your open rate. Try adding the recipient’s name at the start of a subject line, or reference their interests to make the newsletter more personal.

• Emojis: According to a report by Search Engine Land, 64.71% of campaigns have a higher CTR if an emoji is included in the subject line - that’s pretty impressive. Emojis are eye-catching, which is perhaps why including an emoji in a subject line can improve the open rate.

Check out the examples below to see some email subject lines from real campaigns that were successful, in part due to their subject lines:

• Partake Foods: ‘We almost can’t believe our eyes 👀

• Grammarly: ‘NEW: Tone detection has arrived! 🤔 🤩 👍

• Vessi: ‘VIP Access 🌑  Weekend in ECLIPSE BLACK 🌑’

• Ugmonk: ‘🚀 IT’S LIVE! Meet the New Gather Collection’

• Meow Meow Tweet: ‘When we say “all over”... 😉’

Using Emotion to Drive Engagement

Tapping into your audience’s emotions can make your communication with them resonate, which is why using emotion in your subject lines has been shown to drive engagement.

So how does this work?

There are three powerful ways to tap into your audience’s emotions and drive engagement: curiosity, urgency, and exclusivity. 

To trigger curiosity, you want to pique the interest of your followers by hinting at something exciting, without giving everything away. 

Next, create a sense of urgency by implying that there is a time limit, e.g. Last Chance, 24 hours left to try [product].

Lastly, you’ll want to make your subscribers feel special by offering them something that is exclusively for them because they’re subscribed to your newsletter. This could be an exclusive offer or a sale that you’ve granted them early access to.

Here are some extra tips for incorporating triggers such as curiosity, urgency, and exclusivity into your campaigns:

• Use Power Words: The right language can make all the difference. Evoking emotion is easy when you know what language to use. Power words such as ‘exclusive’, ‘limited’, and ‘hurry’ evoke emotions of urgency, exclusivity, and curiosity together.

• Leverage Imagery: Make sure your language is vivid and imaginative when crafting your subject line. This will help evoke mental imagery in your subscribers and ensure your newsletter resonates with them.

• Create Scenarios: Use your subject lines to create scenarios relevant to your followers, showing them what they could have access to or enjoy by opening your newsletter.

Leveraging Social Proof and Authority

The term ‘social proof’ is a term used to describe a psychological phenomenon that implies that if other people are taking part in something, then others will follow - i.e. if everyone else is doing it then I should be doing it too.

Pair this with showing that you have the authority to offer the best products/services and your marketing is golden. Without social proof, you can’t be an authority on a subject, and without authority, social proof can’t be effective, which is why leveraging these two elements together is essential.

The best way of leveraging social proof and authority in your marketing is to ensure your campaigns are credible, popular, and endorsed by authority figures/brands. Here are some key ways to manage this to achieve each of these points with your newsletters:

• Testimonials/Reviews: It’s obvious that you’re going to say your business is great, so let your customers be your brand ambassadors to make your marketing more credible. Include your recent review scores or, even better, embed a recent testimonial from a happy customer to really drive home your great reputation. It’s best to include reviews in a content block just after you’ve mentioned your products - this way they have all the information they need about your brand, plus some genuine reviews to back up how great you are.

• Popularity: If people know your brand/product is already popular, they’re far more likely to engage with it. Make sure you reference how many people are already using and benefiting from your product - you could include some customer testimonials of people raving about your products, or some recent stats demonstrating how many products you’ve sold recently.

• Endorsements: If you’re working with influencers or authoritative figures, make sure to shout about these endorsements in your emails. There are many types of influencers including those in the fashion and fitness industries who would help gain more traction and trust for your brand. When subscribers see that someone they trust is endorsing your brand, they’ll be more likely to trust you and buy your product. You could select a space in the middle section of your email so that it’s embedded seamlessly within your content and use this to include a space for endorsement each month.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

We’ve all made mistakes when it comes to subject lines, and we’re keen for you to learn from some of ours to give you a head start with your campaigns.

Some common subject line mistakes include:

• Being Too Vague: If your subject line is too vague, it will be easily missed and your open rate will undoubtedly be poor. For example, simply saying you have a sale in your subject line is quite vague and you could be more specific by saying “50% Off Sale!”. Make sure your subject line is eye-catching and to the point for best results.

• Over-Promising: Equally, you don’t want to promise too much in your subject lines. If you’re saying there’s a discount code in an email but this would involve the user visiting your website, not only is this misleading but it can also result in a high bounce rate/low conversion rate.

• Using Spam Triggers: While it’s tempting to use those exciting buzz words such as ‘FREE!’, ‘SALE’, and ‘GUARANTEED’, these words are known to set off spam filters, so it’s best to avoid them to increase the chances of your newsletter landing in your subscribers’ inboxes.

• Too Many Characters: As we mentioned earlier on, most email systems only allow you to show a certain number of characters. The advised amount of characters is 30 - 50 characters, which will ensure the subject line appears fully on all devices. Keep your subject line short and sweet to ensure it’s shown in its entirety regardless of device or email system.

To avoid spam triggers and other pitfalls, you could try using spam checkers before sending your campaigns. Tools such as MailTester and SpamAssassin can identify whether your email is likely to have a high spam score and provide you with advice for correcting this. These tools work by scanning the content of your email (including the subject line) for keywords that often flag a user’s spam folder. They also investigate the reputation of a brand/email domain to see if the email is being sent from a reputable source.

It is worth bearing in mind that these tools are unable to read an email contextually, as a human would. For example, it may be necessary for you to include certain keywords that may be deemed as having a high spam score, particularly if you ensure that the rest of your content is engaging and outweighs any content that may be deemed a little spammy. While these tools are effective, it’s always worth looking over your content yourself as a final check.

Generally speaking, you’d want your newsletter to achieve a spam score of no more than 3. A newsletter with a spam score of 3 or less should be delivered to invoices with little problem, whereas higher than this is likely to land your email in a subscriber's spam folder.

It’s also key to test your email across multiple devices to ensure the subject line appears as you’d expect. Send a test email and see how it appears on a laptop, tablet, and mobile device to ensure it isn’t cut off or appearing negatively for any of your followers.

For more tips and tricks in avoiding the dreading spam folder, check out our blog!

Why Listen to Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!

A/B Testing and Analytics

Continually improving your subject lines will help you to master creating them, and a clever way of doing this is to use A/B testing and analytics tools. 

In beehiiv you can use A/B testing to send out the same email with varying subject lines to determine which subject lines garner the best open rates/conversion rates in your campaigns.

Once you’ve set up A/B testing you can then use the analytics within your beehiiv account to see how each campaign performed, and ultimately see which subject lines were more successful and use these moving forward. You’ll want to look at key metrics such as open rates and click-through rates - the campaigns with the higher results for these specific metrics will be the ones that you should choose to use moving forward.

As mentioned above, you can use beehiiv to track open rates and click-through rates from your campaigns. You can also use Google Analytics to see how users behave on your website after being directed there by email, and also heatmap software such as Hotjar to see how your subscribers interact with your emails.

For ideas on how to improve click-through rates on your campaigns, see how Fantasy Life increased click-through rates by 200% on their beehiiv campaigns!

Product Launch Email Subject Lines Examples to Inspire You

If you need some final inspiration for creating your product launch email subject lines, we’ve got you covered. Check out the below product launch email examples to get your campaigns started:

• “Shh… big surprise coming, don’t miss out!”

• “Ready for a life-changing product?”

• “Hi [Name]! Wanna try something new?”

• “Exclusive first peek at [product name] - click now!”

• “Last chance to use your 50% off coupon!”

• “Limited time offer - Save on [product] today only!”

• “We’ve missed you, have you seen our new product?”

• “Join the revolution - [product name] has arrived”

• “5 days until [product name] launches - you won’t want to miss it”

• “Open for your 25% discount code”

Conclusion 

Hopefully, you now feel more confident in creating compelling subject lines for your next product launch. To recap, make sure your subject lines, are short, sharp, and to the point. Use emotion, social proof, and authority to fully engage your audience. Mastering what your audience wants is key to any successful marketing campaign, and creating subject lines is no different.

Once you’ve got a set of subject lines that you’re happy with, remember not to stop there. Continue to test different subject lines to stay ahead of the curve, making sure that your subject lines stand out in the crowded inboxes of your subscribers.

To create great email campaigns with the most compelling subject lines, start a free 30-day trial with beehiiv today. You can benefit from extensive A/B testing and 3D analytics to delve deeper into how your email newsletters are performing, all while creating beautiful newsletters that are designed to make your brand stand out and grow.

Now go forth and create great subject lines - we can’t wait to hear what you come up with!