The 5-Second Rule: How To Hook Readers With Your Email Opening Lines
Do you have decent open rates but low click-through rates and are worried your email opening lines are to blame?
Email marketing may seem like a simpler marketing strategy due to how quick it can be to write an email versus writing a blog post or creating a video for social media, but there are actually a few different moving pieces you need to worry about.
In this post, we focus on one of those pieces: your email’s opening line.
1. Understand the importance of an email opening line
You might think what you have to say is important. You might even have something incredibly valuable to share to your reader.
But think about how your email appears to your reader.
For starters, their inbox is likely already filled with marketing emails, many of which were likely sent the very same day as yours.
This means you need to stand out from the crowd, which means improving your email subject lines and preheader text.
But this is only half the battle.
Let’s say you’re receiving the open rates you want. What then?
If your reader opens your email, you only have a few seconds to wow them before they click Delete and move onto the next email.
The opening line you choose can do a lot to hook your reader and convince them to read your email all the way through.
In fact, your email opening line is part of a collection of what’s known as “microcopy.”
Microcopy is all of the bits of text that make up your marketing messages that are small yet very important. Other examples of microcopy in email include your subject line, preheader text, call to action (CTA) text, and unsubscribe message.
2. Know your audience
Have you conducted research on your audience?
Do you know the demographics within it, such as how old the majority of them are, their gender or where they’re located?
Do you know which stage most of them are at in your niche? Do you segment them in your email list to make this information easier to find?
Do you know if they like a more casual marketing tone or if they’d prefer for you to keep things professional?
And most importantly, do you know what your audience’s biggest pain points are? What they’re struggling with in your niche? Does something from their personal lives get in the way of their success?
These are things you should know about your audience if you want to succeed in general, not just with your email list.
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you come up with content ideas and products that are designed specifically for the audience you’ve built.
3. Define your value proposition
What value does your email offer to your reader? How will it improve their lives?
Answer these questions before you start working on your email. They’ll help you come up with subject lines, preheader text, opening lines and CTAs that express the value you have to offer to your reader.
4. Incorporate your subject line and preheader text
Your reader reads two elements before they have a chance to read your opening line: your email’s subject line and preheader text.
The subject line is the bold text in your inbox that represents the email’s headline.
The preheader text is the text to the right of the subject line. It contains a preview of your email by default, but your email marketing app should allow you to fill it out so that it acts as a summary to your email, a teaser or even a secondary subject line.
Again, your reader reads your subject line and preheader text before they decide to click on your email. What better way to make them feel like their click was worth it than to make sure your opening line directly relates to both pieces of text?
You don’t need to use this technique for every email you create, but it can be pretty clever to use every once in a while to make things a little more interesting for your reader.
Here’s an example:
- Subject Line: What instrument do you regret buying?
- Preheader Text: Have you ever regretted buying an instrument?
- Opening Line: I ask because I recently bought a guitar everyone’s been raving about that I’m just not vibing with.
5. Start with a bang before you greet your reader
Years and years of writing letters and emails have got you into the habit of starting every email off with “Hi [contact name],” or “Dear [contact name],” but you don’t need to be this formal with email marketing.
In fact, you don’t need to greet your reader at all.
When you do, consider inserting using a more interesting opening line before you insert your greeting.
Here’s an example:
“I ask because I recently bought a guitar everyone’s been raving about that I’m just not vibing with.
Hi [subscriber name],I wanted to talk to you today about buyer regret and how it’s okay not to like something everyone else in this industry likes.”
6. Open with a story
Should your email be a 1,000-word monologue about an experience you had? No, but you can always condense an experience you had into a few short paragraphs and use it as your email opener.
Sure, this is more than just a line, but a good story can really hook your reader, pull them in and convince them to read your email all the way through to the end.
Just make sure the story relates to your email in some way even if it’s just a metaphor for what you have to talk about.
This type of technique is called a “pattern interrupt.” Pattern interrupts are disruptions to patterns. They’re designed to hook your reader by being something they weren’t expecting.
In this case, the pattern is your reader expecting every email to open with “Hi reader.” The disruption is you opening with an engaging story instead.
7. Personalize your opening
Your email marketing app should have ways for you to personalize your emails, such as inserting your subscriber’s name with a tag.
You can kick this up a few notches by segmenting your email list.
Create segments for individual products, customers and non-customers, and the individual topics that exist within your content.
For example, a guitar-based social media creator might have different segments for electric guitars and acoustic guitars.
You can send emails to a specific segment in your list. This allows you to get more unique with personalization in your opening line by mentioning things only that segment would understand.
8. Be relatable
As a content creator, you likely take part in your niche a lot more than your reader does.
This means you’ve probably experienced every issue in your niche that they’ve experienced.
If your email promotes something that offers a solution to a problem, use your opening line to share your own experience with that problem.
9. Be funny
If your audience is used to you using humor in your content, try using it in your emails as well.
Hook them in by saying something funny about what your email is promoting.
You can even reference a trending topic in your niche.
10. Open with a made-up scenario
There’s a trend on TikTok where someone opens a video with something like, “People always ask me, Judy, how do you repot a succulent without killing it, and I always respond with, “I don’t know. I’m a hairdresser. My name’s not even Judy, and I know nothing about plants, but I do know a hair routine you can use to keep your roots healthy and lush.”
You can apply this same technique to your email opening line or get creative and write something similar to it.
11. Offer a solution to a common problem
Oftentimes marketers bury the lead by making readers jump through hoops to get to a solution. Why not offer it right away?
Use your opening line to offer a solution to whatever problem your email is meant to solve.
Provide more context in your email and whatever you’re promoting in it. Offering the solution first might earn you a bit of respect from your reader.
12. Share a fact
Look up statistics and facts for your niche, or run a few studies and discover them yourself.
Find an interesting one that relates to your email, and use it as your opening line.
13. Switch it up
Try and use almost every tip in this list, and rotate them.
Don’t overuse the same technique over and over again. An unexpected opening line can only be unexpected a handful of times.
Switch things up every now and then.
14. Keep track of your analytics
Your email marketing app should have analytics you can monitor.
Subject lines and preheader text affect your open rates.
A low-click through rate could signal a few different issues, including weak opening lines.
15. Test opening lines on a small portion of your audience
Build a few segments in your email list, and choose one of them.
Send the same email to your segment and the rest of your list, but use a more exciting opening line in the email you send to your segment.
The results will give you a pretty good idea of how well a certain opening line technique performs.
You can use this same test for subject lines and CTAs as well.
Most email marketing tools should offer the ability to A/B test specific parts of your email. If yours doesn’t, check out MailerLite. They offer this feature and it is surprisingly easy to use.
Final thoughts
Your email subject lines can make or break the success of every email you send.
Get them wrong and your open rates (and click-through rates) will bomb.
Get them right and you’ll have more subscribers reading your emails than before. And hopefully taking action if the content of the email is on point.
Follow the tips above and use them to get more people opening your emails.