Marketing vs Sales subject lines – How to craft them best for your campagins?

For sales and marketing purposes, email subject lines should be creative yet clear, adding a sense of urgency but still being honest with the message you’re trying to convey. Adding incentives or special offers can also help draw attention to your emails along with using catchy language that will grab readers’ attention at first sight.

Employing both strategic and inventive techniques is important when creating effective email subject lines for sales and marketing purposes.

Although very close to each other, sales and marketing messaging defers in the voice and the way of expression, and we can easily tell if a subject line we are reading is coming from a marketing person, or a sales rep doing cold outreach. 

Is this something you should be paying attention to when crafting your outreach campaigns? 

The quick answer is: Yes – and we’ll go over the principles of crafting marketing vs. sales email subject lines for high open rates.

The thought process of Sales vs. Marketing

The thought process of both sales and marketing is similar, however, there are differences in the way salespeople want to present themselves in front of a potential client, whereas marketing focuses on presenting a product, or solution in the best way possible. And this also reflects on everything they craft for their outreach, starting from the subject lines of the outreach emails.

When crafting your email subject lines, it’s important to know the difference between marketing and sales due to the objective of the campaign. While they may seem similar at first glance, there are subtle nuances that can help you create more effective campaigns, both for your sales and marketing outreach.

Think of the tone of the message you want to convey. Marketers can try a more aggressive approach, and test out alternative buzzwords and phrases, whereas salespeople tend to present themselves as experts in the field that would like to help a prospect with whatever challenge they are facing. So, the subject lines should depict exactly what you want to achieve as an impression on the recipient.

Email Subject line structure

Having a well-structured email subject is crucial for effective communication. It helps to grab the attention of the recipient and gives them a clear idea of what the email is about.

A well-crafted subject line can increase the open rate of your emails and encourage recipients to prioritize reading and responding to your message

1. The main part of the subject line

The main part of a subject line is the first thing that comes after the displayed name you have on your email account. So, to be in correlation with your campaign objective, you need to craft this part as effectively as possible. 

For your sales emails, the best-performing subject lines include very few words, and limited character and are usually in a form of a question, or presenting a value proposition of the product you are selling. This is because, in the sales emails, you want to make a personal connection with the prospect and explore a legitimate interest in collaboration. You want your subject line to look like you are dropping a manual email to a person as part of your day-to-day communication instead of giving them the hint directly that you are trying to pitch a product. 

On the other hand, marketing emails usually contain more numbers and express a bit more FOMO, as they are presenting some sort of an offer that might be limited, or only crafted for the prospect. Marketing subject lines also contain more expressions, play of words, emojis, and other characters to grab the recipient’s attention.

2. The pre-header in marketing vs. sales email subject lines

The pre-header is part of the subject line that is visible only in the inbox preview of the email and gives additional info on the email content that follows. 

The email pre-header is used mostly for marketing emails, and transactional email software usually has it as a feature within their email editing tools.

Marketers add pre-headers to their emails in newsletter form and other marketing email campaigns to give more insights into what the email is about and what the recipient can expect from the offer. It’s usually a short sentence of FOMO. 

As this is mostly perceived as a marketing email subject line, having a pre-header on your sales emails might confuse your prospects, making them think you are sending some offer or a newsletter. You want to make sure your sales email is as personalized as possible, containing also some hyper-personalized parts that will make the approach very personal, like including dynamic one-liners, landing pages, and CTA that connect directly to you, like booking links, instead of using a pre-header.

3. Personalization in subject lines

Including important keywords or action, words can also make your email subject more impactful. And customizing the subject line with custom tags is advisable for both sales and marketing, however in different directions.

We rarely see an email that doesn’t contain our name nowadays. And, it’s still an effective approach to get more personal with the prospect. For sales, adding the first name of the prospect, their company name, and pain point are a good way to establish personalization. For marketing, the first name and industry can be effective for a subject line.

Although necessary, make sure you don’t overdo it! Putting in the prospect’s first name, and/or company name in the subject line is the most common practice, but putting all sorts of custom information is a risk of personalization gone wrong.

Conclusion of email subject lines

There is a thought process that needs to be followed when crafting marketing vs. sales email subject lines.

When crafting email subject lines for sales, you want to be clear and direct about the value proposition of your product or service. Keep your subject line concise to make sure readers understand the point of your message right away. You should aim for a conversational tone—in other words, make sure it sounds like something you would say in real life! Use language that will draw people in to learn more about what your company has to offer. Don’t use the pre-headers as you don’t want your email to be perceived as a marketing email.

On the other hand, when creating marketing subject lines, you should think in terms of storytelling. Your subject line should intrigue readers enough to give them a reason to click and find out more about what you have to offer, in the form of a FOMO. Make use of powerful words that evoke emotion such as surprise, delight, or curiosity. Use your pre-headers to enrich your subject line and give it a spin.

Personalization is good for both sales and marketing campaigns, however sticking to a norm and common practice would do more good than overdoing it.