6 Words You Should Never Use in Sales Email Subject Lines

If you are an organization which is interested in lead generation and prospecting, the sales email is one piece of communication which you don’t want to be getting wrong.

The way you structure and create content for your sales email will determine whether you are consigned to the spam folder forever, or are opened, read, and considered – either being actioned straightaway or left aside to return to at a later date.

You know what they say about first impressions – so the subject line of a sales email can be make or break in terms of whether it is even opened. Rather than tell you what to write (this is likely to be determined by what you are marketing to a large extent), it might be better to have a walk through some words which are best avoided in a sales email. So for the purpose of launching a sales email campaign which doesn’t deter prospective customers, let’s have a look at some words which could be described as completely unsuitable for this purpose.

1. Your organization’s name

Isn’t it the height of arrogance to assume a recipient will have heard of your company? Unless your brand is a household name, the precious piece of space in your subject line could be used to better effect in different ways. Try something more personal, or related to the customer’s presumed situation or line of work. Aside from the fact that using your organisation’s name – when it is likely the recipient hasn’t heard of it – marks the email out as having sales as its main objective, you could also get disregarded due to the unfamiliarity. There are of course exceptions, and when contacting inbound prospects who have initiated dialogue, there is a good reason to use your company name in a subject title.

2. Lowest price

On the face of it, guaranteeing a low price seems like a good idea, in the knowledge that many customers enjoy a good bargain. A low price, however, is different from ‘value’, and instead of pushing the notion that you have an attractive product or service based on a rock bottom price, you should emphasise that this is an excellent rate, given the strength of your product or service. How you do this will vary on the product or service itself, but loudly touting yourself as offering a lower price than everyone else might actually put some customers off, and can smell of desperation.

3. Re:

You may have noticed a few emails in recent times with ‘Re:’ in the subject line to denote a reply, when you haven’t actually emailed the sender in the first place. If you did, what did you do with these emails? If you even got as far as opening them, it won’t have been long until you discovered that they weren’t from anyone you have sent an email to in the first place, and that the email is, essentially, trying to hoodwink or trick you. This is about being professional, and one of the worst possible starts – and likely an ‘end’, too – is to use underhand tactics in order to grab the attention of a recipient.

4. Writing in capital letters

OK, it isn’t a word as such, but capping up your email subject titles can appear very ‘shouty’, and in sales, this might not be the best way to go about things. Think about it – why does the sender feel the need to write using capitals? That might be a question on the mind of the recipient. It could create a feeling of mistrust, similar to the use of ‘re:’, due to the sender’s choice of capital letters in order to make them stand out in your inbox. A recipient might think: ‘Why do they need to shout more than everyone else?’ ‘Why are they so desperate for my attention?’

5. Misspelled words

Words which contain spelling errors, also known as typos, can do you more harm than good. You might be prompting the sender to think: ‘If they can’t even spell words in the subject title correctly, why should I even devote the time to reading what is in the body of the email?’ and they would be well within their rights to do so. It is all about making the right kind of impression, and displaying a weak grasp of the English language in your subject title is just about the worst impression you can make.

6. Superlatives

‘Excellent’, ‘wonderful’, ‘fantastic’ or even ‘good’ – your product or service might be so ‘great’ but it should speak for itself, rather than have you as a cheerleader. Adjectives of this nature are known as superlatives, and as a rule of thumb it can be wise to leave them out of sales email subject lines all together. While the word itself might signal something which is out of the ordinary, the human brain can be so switched on to sales techniques, that it becomes automatically switched off at something which proclaims itself to be the best thing since sliced bread.

So there you have it, a collection of words which might derail your sales email campaign before it has even gotten off the ground. Remember, you can be crazy, wacky or funny in order to catch the attention of your recipient, but it should be done in a thoughtful way, rather than blatantly trying to grab attention by hook or by crook. Don’t underestimate the power of subtlety!