How to Write the Perfect Ecommerce Email Subject Line

1. Introduction

Email Subject Lines: The First Big Hurdle

In email marketing, the first hurdle to overcome is getting your customers to open your message. And perhaps the most influential component of any email marketing campaign is your chosen subject line.

To better understand how Ecommerce marketers and store owners can formulate the perfect email subject line, we analyzed nearly 28 million emails — 27,879,642 to be exact — that users sent through the CM Commerce (previously Receiptful) platform. With all that data, our goal is to share information that can help improve how you craft future subject lines.

At CM Commerce, we group our users’ emails into three distinct categories:

1. Receipts
2. Follow-Up emails
3. Abandoned Cart emails

For each, we analyzed:

• 17,432,183 Ecommerce Receipts, with an average 64.69% open rate
• 7,246,557 Follow-Up emails, with an average 41.95% open rate
• 3,200,902 Abandoned Cart emails, with an average 32.70% open rate

Of the 27,879,642 total emails sent, we saw an average 55.11% open rate among the transactional and lifecycle emails our users sent to their customers.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let us lay some ground rules…