The average email open rate across industries is 19.66% in 2022.

it’s probably for one of two reasons:

Subscribers don’t want to hear from you (unlikely, since they signed up for your emails)
You’re not framing your subject lines to show what’s in it for them.

Before people open your email, they want to know that it’s written for ‘them’.

The job of the email subject line is to make the reader know ‌they want to see the email.

People don’t care about you — or your product — and if you focus on yourself, you lose them.

In 2020, a team of researchers examined how messaging affected solar adoption in 29 different cities. They found ‌people were twice as likely to adopt solar power when the message focused on personal gain for the adopter rather than social responsibility.

Research shows that the brain releases dopamine — a feel-good chemical — as a reward for satisfying our curiosity. So once we encounter a knowledge gap or something else we don’t know, we want to figure it out.

Use headlines that cater to at least one of the five dimensions of curiosity:

Deprivation sensitivity – a knowledge gap that needs to be filled
Joyous exploration – fascination with a subject or concept
Social curiosity – a desire to learn more about other people
Stress tolerance – the willingness to embrace confusion, doubt, and other forms of distress
Thrill-seeking – a desire for adventure

In a study, GetResponse found that triggered emails performed almost twice better than newsletters. Open rates for triggered emails reached 35.64%, while newsletter open rates sat at 20.58%.

personalization doesn’t mean adding a first name tag to your subject line (cue should you open this email [firstname]?). The GetResponse study found that as of 2022, open rates were actually lower when subject lines included this form of personalization.

That specificity sets an expectation and allows readers to picture a clear outcome.

GetResponse found that subject lines with the word “now” scored an open rate of 31.73%.

Litmus found that most people open emails on their mobile phones.

While the average subject line is 44 characters long, mobile phones can only accommodate around 33 characters in the field of view.