Counterintuitively, highly formatted and image-heavy emails can feel corporate and impersonal, decreasing engagement. Shifting to a simpler, plain-text style mimics a personal message from a friend, which increases perceived authenticity and encourages more replies and genuine connection.

A rarely used but effective tactic is placing the same emoji at the beginning and end of the email preheader (the second subject line). This visual framing technique draws attention in a crowded inbox and can improve open rates for both B2B and B2C campaigns.

Frame email subject lines to appeal to the higher-level position your audience desires. A manager wants to know what a CMO is doing. This psychological tactic, which plays on ambition, can lift open rates by 24-28% over standard personalization by speaking to who your audience wants to become.

Combine two specific audience identifiers in your subject line, like role and company attribute ("Mid-market CMOs") or interest and a pain point ("Beauty fans with sensitive skin"). This "double personalization" tactic reportedly increases B2B open rates by 24% and B2C by 29% by making the message feel hyper-relevant.

While many marketers use brackets at the beginning of email subject lines, new data from subjectline.com shows placing them at the end is boosting open rates. This tactic works by drawing the reader's eye to a key callout, and contrary to myth, it does not negatively impact deliverability or land emails in spam.

Email providers prioritize senders with high engagement. Sending at least five emails per month generates more opens and clicks, signaling credibility. This counterintuitively leads to higher average open rates and better inbox placement, contrary to the common fear of over-sending.

Personalizing subject lines with a recipient's industry or interests is a known tactic that provides a solid 20% lift in open rates. However, this should be considered a baseline, as more advanced psychological tactics like aspirational messaging can yield even higher returns of 24-28%.

Data from Subjectline.com reveals a powerful, simple tactic for email marketing. Using a "continuation pre-header" that begins with "and," "but," or "plus" creates a narrative link to the subject line, sparking curiosity and significantly boosting open rates. This is an easy-to-implement test for any campaign.

For subscribers who don't open an email, a simple and effective tactic is to resend the exact same content. The only change is tweaking the subject line and pre-header to capture their attention. Since they never saw the original content, it's still new to them and requires minimal effort to redeploy.