Close the deal in the subject line

Have you seen the new James Bond trailer? It's 2 minutes and 34 seconds long. Nothing we have to say is as impressive as the James Bond trailer, in my humble opinion. If you're not a fan of the Bond movies, then replace Bond with Star Wars, Harry Potter, or Finding Nemo. The point is we only have a short window to grab our lead's attention. 

So how do we compete with James Bond? We need to start writing better subject lines.

Seem obvious? It should be. So how do you start?

Write the subject line like you're trying to grab your best friend's attention. Write the subject line like you're writing it 1:1 for the lead. You don't need to sell the product in the subject line. Instead, you need to sell yourself (or organization). Your goal is to grab your lead's attention and convince them to click open the email. From the subject line alone, they need to be intrigued enough to read that email's content. Or else you just did a ton of work putting together a campaign/cadence for nothing. 

Next, you must show you've got a sense of humor. Life is too short and chaotic any other day of the week but add Covid-19 on top of it all... we all just want to laugh. 

And finally, realize that you are, in fact, not as attractive as a new James Bond movie trailer and be totally cool with that. You can't compete with that, and you shouldn't have to. You just need to compete with the other day-to-day emails that lead receives in their inbox.