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The Art and Science of Effective Subject Lines returnpath.com
• Most subject lines were between 41 and 50 characters.
• Subject lines 61 - 70 characters long had the highest read rate (17%).
Overall, our research indicates that there is actually no correlation between the length of a subject line and its
read rate. When comparing the number of characters in a subject line to the read rate, the Pearson’s correlation*
value was -.03, which shows us that there’s no relationship between the number of characters in a subject line
and whether or not the email is opened.
Just because there’s no specific correlation between
length and read rate doesn’t mean you can fully
ignore how many characters are in your subject line.
Different devices have different display capabilities,
so it’s important to keep this in mind as you write
your subject lines.
A typical desktop inbox displays about 60 characters
of an email’s subject line, while mobile devices show
just 25-30 characters. If your audience is primarily
reading your emails on smartphones, place the offer
or call to action at the beginning of the subject line
where it’s more likely to be seen.
Being mindful, too, of how your subject lines may
be truncated can also avoid embarrassing brand
mistakes, like “license” being truncated to “lice.”
Shorter subject lines may see higher performance
for a mostly mobile audience, too. Look at your
existing data for insights like this, or use subject line
length as one of your next elements to test.
The Great Debate: Subject Line Length
The optimal length for email subject lines has been hotly debated over the years, with wildly
conflicting conclusions. We looked at emails received by over 2 million email subscribers from over
3,000 retail senders in February 2015, and found that:
Messages
Characters with this
in subject Average subject line
line read rate length
0-10 14% 1%
11-20 13% 5%
21-30 11% 18%
31-40 14% 19%
41-50 12% 25%
51-60 14% 17%
61-70 17% 6%
71-80 14% 3%
81-90 14% 2%
91-100 15% 1%
>100 9% 3%
*The Pearson’s correlation is the most common measure to determine if two sets of data have a relationship. The
values for a Pearson correlation can range from -1 to 1, with 0 showing no correlation, a -1 showing a negative
correlation, and a +1 showing a positive correlation.