The subject line is the gateway to an email; use the wrong words and get sent straight to the trash folder. (Or worse, the spam folder.) It doesn’t matter if your email holds a funny gif, an amazing insight, or a fantastic deal on your products/services – if your subject line sucks, you might as well have sent a blank email.

You don’t have much room to grab your prospect’s attention, so avoid the following in your email subject lines and save space for the words that really count.    

• Your company name (XYZ, Inc.)
  • If the recipient has never heard of XYZ, Inc., including it in the email subject line simply reinforces that it’s a sales email – because why else would a business they've never heard of be emailing them?
• Jargon, such as “reaching out,” “connecting,” and “touching base”
  • It goes without saying that emails are reaching out/connecting/touching base; it’s practically redundant to say so.
• Time-related phrases like “15 minutes” or “quick call?”
  • What the email recipient sees in this subject line: a salesperson they’ve never met/heard of asking for a meeting. Try to find a faster a way to establish yourself as a pushy salesperson and you’ll fail.
• Mistakes
  • Incorrect grammar, punctuation, spelling, and typos make you look unprofessional and disorganized.
  • Also, avoid mistakes with personalization tokens. You’d ignore an email that said, literally, “Hi, [firstname],” right? That’s because it makes the message seem less human.

The words that send emails to your trash are likely different than those that send emails to my trash; it’s a fruitless endeavor to attempt to ferret out all the hated words and avoid them. However, you can use our advice above for starters as well as read more here.