Final Touches: How Agents Can Test Their Email Subject Lines

The past two weeks, we've been laser-focused on boosting your email open rate. That means we're going to focus on something you may not spend a lot of time on — your email subject line.

Check out these posts for how to write email subject lines that are bound to stand out with your audience:

• How real estate agents can write better email subject lines (Part 1 of 2)
• How real estate agents can write better email subject lines (Part 2 of 2)

Of course, every email is different and every database is full of unique people with unique motivations — so it's important to go past best practices and measure how well your subject lines perform.

Analyzing your email subject lines

Prior to sending, consider using a subject line analyzer so you can determine if you are hitting the right notes. While it was technically designed to analyze headlines, not subject lines, the best analyzer we have found is from CoSchedule. The service analyzes your content to ensure it has a balance of common words, uncommon words, emotional words and power words. Below, when we enter in the subject line, "How to do the right thing," it reminds us to add more "power words."

A/B test your subject lines in your email client

Even the best marketers — think Apple, Uber and Amazon — rarely send out a mass email with just one subject line hitting every contact. Most big companies A/B test their subject lines to a small group of contacts, then they may send the bulk of the emails using the winning subject line.

Most big mail clients allow for A/B testing of headlines, so consider checking out their FAQs to see how to set one up. If your platform doesn't allow for it, it's possible to test manually when you have important email campaigns going out.

Start by sending Subject Line 1 to 5 percent of your audience, and Subject Line 2 to the other 5 percent. Give the email a few hours or even a day, then send the remaining 90 percent of emails using the winning subject line. Remember, this only works when you have a large sample of at least 1,000 contacts and you may want to reserve the manual testing for email campaigns that really matter because it can be a time-consuming task.

Ready to take your marketing to the next level?

Check out our series on content creation, where we discuss curation and plagiarization and the best tools for content curation.

To view the original article, visit the Realtor.com Results blog.