You already know the basic rules for subject lines from the Email Marketing Basics course. You know a subject line should be short, specific and truthful. Now we will go deeper. We will look at specific types of subject lines that have proven themselves over time, at how the subject line sets the recipient's expectations, and at the preheader as a standalone tool with rules of its own. At the end, we will show you how to verify your chosen variant instead of guessing.

Eight ways to build a subject line

When you don't know where to start, pick one of these proven types and write three variants based on it:

• A question. "How much is an unopened email costing you?" A question makes people look for the answer. Always make sure the email actually delivers it.
• Starting with "How". It points straight to a how-to. "How to cut campaign prep down to half an hour."
• Controversy. A contrarian take on a topic your recipients care about. People want to get to the bottom of things.
• A plain description of what it is. A straightforward message works brilliantly where recipients already know you. "New templates for spring campaigns."
• Numbers. They are easy to remember and promise a clear overview. Headlines with numbers are not on magazine covers by accident.
• Curiosity. A hint that doesn't give everything away. It takes creativity and an honest payoff inside the email.
• Urgency. Urgency is just your wish until you tie it to a specific deadline and to what the person gains.
• Money and familiar names. A specific amount or a name the recipient knows attracts attention reliably.

You don't have to invent from scratch. Go through your own inbox and write down the subject lines that made you open an email. You will quickly see which types work on your target audience.

The subject line sets expectations

People use the subject line to set their expectations of what they will find inside. You know the feeling from the cinema: you went because of a great trailer and an hour in you realized the trailer was the best part of the whole film. That is exactly how an email feels when its subject line promises more than the content delivers.

This leads to a rule that is often forgotten. The subject line must not be the most interesting thing about the entire email. If you manipulate someone into opening and they end up feeling disappointed, they won't open your next email. Because your real job is not getting this campaign opened, it is getting the next one opened.

A simple test helps too. Read the subject line through the recipient's eyes and ask: "Is there anything in it for me?" If the subject line doesn't answer, rewrite it.

The preheader has rules of its own

The preheader, the email's snippet text, is not a second copy of the subject line. Quanda gives it a 50 character limit so it displays correctly across different email clients. Use it like this:

• Summarize or clarify the content. If your subject line talks about a spring sale, use the preheader to say which products it covers.
• Finish the thought the subject line opened. They appear next to or below each other, so they work as one sentence.
• Place your first call to action here, for example "read more" or "find out more".
• Try humor, a symbol or a personal tone. The preheader can take more than the subject line because it is less exposed.
• Mention a specific link from the email so the reader knows what to look for inside.

Verify it with an A/B test

Instead of guessing, use a campaign with A/B testing. You create an email, copy it, and in version B change only the subject line. Everything else stays the same. You pick a test group of recipients and choose open rate as the criterion, because that is exactly what the subject line influences.

Quanda then sends both versions to randomly selected groups, evaluates the winner after a set time, and sends the more successful variant to the remaining recipients. After a few tests like this, you will know which words work on your audience. That is information no generic handbook can give you.

Getting the open is only half the job. A high open rate with a low click rate means the subject line worked and the content didn't. According to a Microsoft study, the average person holds their attention on an email for roughly eight seconds. In this lesson, we will go through what those eight seconds have to accomplish and how to build your copy so the reader keeps going all the way to the button.

The first few seconds: image and headline

After opening an email, the eyes don't go to the text, they go to the image. Only then to the headline. That is the order in which the reader decides whether to stay.

The opening image has a single job. To tell the recipient this email is for them. It should capture their reality, the industry they work in, the environment they know, the situation they are living. Beware of product photos for people who don't use your product yet. When a recipient sees an image they don't understand, you lose them.

The main headline serves two functions. It grabs attention and persuades the reader to continue. Connect it to a familiar problem, to a situation the recipient regularly faces, to a solution they are looking for. If you don't know what that is, ask your customers with a short questionnaire. Their own words are the best source of headlines.

Five questions every email answers

Every recipient silently asks themselves five questions. A good email answers them in this order:

• Who is writing to me? Answered by the sender name.
• What are they writing about? Answered by the subject line, the preheader and the message preview.
• Is it for me? Answered by the opening image and the headline.
• Why should I read it? Answered by the lead and the first paragraph, which offers a concrete benefit.
• Do I care about what I'm asked to do? Answered by the call to action.

When you go through these five questions after finishing an email and hesitate on any of them, you know exactly which part to rewrite.

Write so the copy can be scanned

Readers don't read online content, they scan it. They notice headlines, images, buttons and links, and only then do they possibly start reading. A waterfall of text is therefore the fastest route to deletion.

Break the content into short blocks, use subheadings and leave white space around elements. Information is absorbed more easily from well-structured text. If you have a message that needs more text, it belongs on a landing page. In the email, leave a headline, a lead and a prominent link to the place where the reader can learn more.

Speak the recipient's language, not your own

It is the target audience, not the product, that decides whether copy is interesting. You describe ordinary cottage cheese to athletes as a source of protein and to moms as a quick, cheap snack. The same product, two completely different texts.

The most common newsletter mistake is the "about us, for us" style. We describe ourselves through features and news, while the reader wants to know what's in it for them. Don't just list properties, let the reader picture themselves in the situation. There is a difference between "Our glasses will look great on you" and "Glasses don't have to be rose-tinted for you to see beautifully".

And don't be afraid of a personal tone. Newsletters with a real person, a real experience or a story behind them earn trust faster than perfectly polished corporate messaging.

A call to action people can click

You already know an email should have one main CTA. This is about how to execute it.

Never link the bare word "here". Instead of "Learn more about the product HERE", make the link out of the whole phrase "Learn more about this product". A longer link is easier to see and says what happens after the click. For a button, use a contrasting color, make it large enough and leave space around it.

Try testing both. Sometimes a text link brings more clicks, elsewhere a button wins. The result differs from audience to audience.

And one last step that gets forgotten. The email and the landing page should work as mirrors. The same images, the same button colors, the same headline. After clicking, the reader then never hesitates for a second about whether they are in the right place.

An image is the first thing a recipient sees after opening an email, and also the most common source of technical problems. A wrongly sized image takes ages to load, a distorted image looks amateurish, and three photos side by side in different heights break the whole layout. In this lesson, we will go through how to prepare images correctly and where to get them.

The email width determines the image size

The image size follows from the email width and the margins you have set. You set the email width in the email editor using the gear icon in the right menu, and you will find the margins at the very bottom of the right menu after clicking the Image object.

The default email width in Quanda is 650 px. Subtract the margins of 2 x 16 px and you get 618 px. That is the width your image should have. We ourselves use an email width of 730 px and insert images 800 px wide, they shrink slightly after insertion.

A few rules worth following:

• An inserted image always adapts to the space it has in the email, but the goal is a ratio as close to 1:1 as possible.
• Always work with the width only. The height is calculated automatically, so the aspect ratio is preserved and the image doesn't get distorted.
• Leave a small icon that is smaller than the available space displayed at 100% of its original size.
• Keep each uploaded image under 2 MB. A stock photo 4000 px wide takes needlessly long to load for the recipient.

Images side by side need identical dimensions

When you want three images in one row, they must have identical dimensions, otherwise the row won't look good. You calculate the width by subtracting the margins and the gaps between columns from the email width. With a 730 px width and default settings, that is (730 minus 4 x 16) divided by three, so roughly 222 px. Feel free to work with 250 px, together that is more than the email width, so it will fit.

The process has two steps. First set the same width for all three images and note down the resulting heights. Then use the smallest of them as the target height and crop the other two to match. You get three images with identical dimensions.

Both edits can be done in Photopea, a free online tool that requires no registration. You change the size via Image, Image Size, and you will find cropping in the left panel. Save as JPG.

Where to get photos and which to choose

An image found through a search engine on someone else's site is not free. Copyright applies even to non-commercial use and fines can easily run into thousands of dollars. Legal sources of quality free photos include Unsplash, Pixabay and Gratisography. Just watch out for protected brands and logos inside photos, those need a separate license check.

A stock library doesn't have to be your only source though. Authentic photos from your company, your own illustrations or team snapshots attract more attention than a photo the recipient has already seen in five other newsletters.

Video, tables and other elements

Quanda takes a video's thumbnail image directly from YouTube in the maxresdefault.jpg variant. If the video is in a resolution lower than HD, this thumbnail doesn't exist and the image won't load. You have three options: upload the video in HD, make a manual screenshot and insert it as a linked image, or replace maxresdefault.jpg in the image address field with another available variant, for example 0.jpg or hqdefault.jpg.

You can insert a table in several ways. A simple table can be copied from Excel straight into a text field, but it must contain only text and numbers and be narrower than the email. You can also insert it as an image or via an HTML element, which guarantees correct display. A large table is better offered as a download behind a button.

Before you send the campaign, check the preview for both desktop and mobile and send yourself a test email. And keep in mind that some recipients have image display turned off, so never hide the message exclusively in an image.

Greeting people by name is standard today and no longer impresses anyone on its own. The difference between personalization that works and personalization that feels like a template job is in the details. In the right form of the greeting, in the tone you choose, and in whether you personalize only the salutation or the content too. In this lesson, we will go through what Quanda can insert and how to use it so it sounds human.

What Quanda can insert

You insert personalization in the email editor by clicking into a text field at the spot where you want it, and choosing Personalization at the bottom right of the window above it. A tag enclosed in a pair of curly braces is inserted into the text, and the system replaces it with the specific value from the contact at send time.

For the salutation, you can choose from:

• a complete formal salutation including the prefix, that is "Dear Mr." or "Dear Ms." combined with the last name,
• a complete friendly salutation including the prefix, that is "Hello" or "Hi" combined with the first name,
• the last name on its own,
• the first name on its own.

Besides the salutation, you can insert other data stored on the contact and on the user, for example the signature. You can combine the tag with your own text, so if you know the campaign goes out on Thursday, you can write something like "Happy Thursday, Jane". You can get the salutation into the subject line too, just copy the tag from the text field into the Email subject field above the editor.

Prepare the salutation in advance

Quanda's automatic personalized salutation, addressing each recipient by name, doesn't appear on its own. You create it using automations in Contacts, ideally right at import, and in campaigns you then simply use the ready-made value.

Don't cut corners on this step. A subject line like "Special offers tailored to you John Smith" is more likely to get a laugh than a click. A broken salutation does more harm than no salutation at all. Likewise, choose whether to address people by first name or last name based on the relationship you have with them. And adapt the tone to the audience. A travel agency for seniors won't get far with a subject line like "Hey Mary, how about a cool trip at a sweet price?"

Personalizing the sender

People first look at who is writing to them, and only then at what they are writing. In our survey of 311 respondents, 42% said the sender name is the first place they look when an email arrives.

If your customers have their own dedicated account manager, use the Automatic sender selection on the Sending page. Quanda then automatically swaps the sending address and the signature on each email according to who is listed as the owner of that contact. The customer receives an email from a person they know, which shows in both open rates and clicks.

Personalize the content, not just the salutation

The name at the top is a start. You gain real relevance when you add information you have about the recipient into the copy. Refer to the product they bought, the service they used, the industry they work in.

A personalized footer works especially well, telling each person why they are receiving your email. It reminds them of the connection and reduces unsubscribes. You can store the text values for these parts in custom fields automatically, again through automations in Contacts.

A simple rule applies. The more you know about your contacts, the further you can take personalization. And where you lack the data, well-done segmentation does the same job.

When personalization feels robotic

A few situations to avoid:

• A name in the subject line of every campaign. Once in a while it delights, every time it feels mechanical.
• A salutation disconnected from the rest of the text. When a personal "Hello, Jane" is followed by an impersonal corporate message, the contrast is jarring.
• Empty or incomplete data. For contacts without a name, always check what the email looks like without the filled-in value.
• Personalization where it says nothing. Adding someone's industry to a sentence that would work without it is extra effort with no effect.

Always send yourself a test email and read it as the recipient. If the salutation feels forced to you, it will feel forced to them too.

Black Friday, Christmas, the start of the summer holidays, end-of-season sales. In these periods, people receive several times more emails than usual and the bar for capturing attention is higher. At the same time, these are the days when people are most ready to buy. In this lesson, we will go through what to do so your seasonal campaign doesn't end up lost among dozens of identical offers.

The plan comes before the season starts

A seasonal campaign can't be invented a day in advance. Make a simple table. In the first column, write the groups of your contacts, and in the following columns, the week numbers. Then fill in the cells with what you will send each group in each week. A plan twelve weeks ahead shows you what content you are still missing and gives you time to prepare it.

Prepare the finished campaigns in advance and schedule their sending for a specific date and time. On the busiest days, you then just watch the results instead of writing copy at the last minute.

Segment more than usual

The blanket "everything to everyone" approach never works, and even less so in a crowded season. Divide your recipients by previous purchases, purchase frequency, gender, product categories, or by how engaged they are with your emails. Then prepare a tailored offer for each segment.

Don't overdo the number of segments though. If you create ten groups and can't manage to write ten different emails for them, you have gained nothing. Better three segments and three properly written offers.

An offer needs a deadline

A discount alone doesn't move anyone, because discounts flood in during the season. What moves people is a specific deadline. Phrases like "today only", "only until midnight tonight" or "last two days" create real urgency. You won't persuade someone who doesn't need your offer, but you will decide those who are considering it and hesitating.

Highlight the essential information. Use bold type, text color and a contrasting button so the reader sees within a few seconds what you are offering and until when it applies.

Send time and frequency

There is no rule that Tuesday is best and Sunday worst. Every business is different. In the season, it pays to try even times when your email won't get buried among dozens of others. According to our survey, more than 70% of people check their email on weekends too.

Watch your frequency against your own numbers. As soon as open rates and clicks drop and unsubscribes start growing, you are sending too much. As long as people aren't complaining, you are fine. In some industries, three emails a week are common, elsewhere that is too much.

The season is not just about discounts

If you send nothing but offers, people stop reading you before the best one arrives. So complement your sales emails with content that is useful right now:

• operational information, for example the last day to order so the package arrives before Christmas,
• practical tips related to what people buy from you, such as how to choose a gift or how to prepare for a trip,
• extended opening hours, changes in delivery dates, holidays,
• a thank-you and a recap of the year with no sales message.

It is exactly this useful content that holds the attention you will later need for your sales emails.

Two practical points to finish. Make sure your landing page and your whole website can handle higher traffic and that you have enough people to handle inquiries. And have a backup plan with clearly assigned responsibility in case something goes wrong. In the season, problems are solved in hours, not days.