How to write better subject lines for fundraising emails

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19 February 2013

How to write better subject lines for fundraising emails

From the ClickZ Advanced Email Marketing blog, here are some brain-science-based ways to create better subject lines: Email Subject Lines and the Brain. Try these:

Use Certain Emotional or Personal Words to Grab Attention: The recipient's name, or certain other "trigger words," like free, limited, urgent, need, etc.
Increase the "Standoutness": Make your subject line different from the others. Longer, shorter, stranger.
Don't Habituate Your Subscribers: If your subject line is always the same, you're training recipients not to pay attention. Vary it.

The inbox is a crowded place, and your subject line is a very tiny canvass for capturing interest. We need to put a lot of attention (and testing) on those subject lines.

Posted by Jeff Brooks on 19 February 2013 at 08:24 | Permalink

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The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It's not about any technology, medium, or technique. It's about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It's already here. More.

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Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you'll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. More.

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