Spring Newsletter Subject Lines – How to Write Subject Lines for Your Spring Newsletter

Looking for inspiration for your spring newsletter subject lines? You’re in the right place! See the best examples of spring newsletters that will get your open rates shooting through the roof.

When we’re on the other side of an email exchange — i.e., not the sender — we might choose to open an email and engage with the content for a number of reasons. 

Maybe the language in the subject line sparks our curiosity, triggers a fear of missing out, or appeals to our love of deals and discounts. 

Whatever the case may be, the email subject line is our first point of contact and what ultimately sways us to learn more or delete the message, unopened.

To improve open rates, engagement, and conversions, email marketers are constantly running A/B tests to determine which aspects of their emails are successful and which aren’t. .

From the email copy to the graphics and CTAs, everything is fair game for testing. But it remains true that the most important factor to test is the subject line. 

For any spring newsletter or campaign to be successful, you have to optimize your use of the subject line to catch the recipients’ attention and — in typically 50 characters or less — convince them to open the email. 

Sound easy? 

Well, considering that office workers receive an average of 121 emails every day, we’d have to say that it’s not an easy feat in the slightest.  

This article provides tips for optimizing your spring newsletter’s subject lines but also goes a step further to examine the effectiveness of four subject lines from spring email campaigns.   

Are your spring email subject lines effective?

Personalized emails are six times more succesful than generic emails at generating higher amounts of revenue.

By conducting regular audits across your website, blog, social media, and email channels, you can use updated consumer data to accurately segment the email list for your spring newsletter.

And when paired with Voice-of-Customer (VoC) research, you now have an armory of data that tells you exactly what your long-time customers, recent customers, and churned customers want.

If you rely on data from five years ago rather than fresh information, your efforts to incentivize the target audience to opt-in won’t be as effective as they could be. 

This is because a lot of economic change can happen in one year — ahem, COVID-19 — let alone in five years. 

Because buyer behavior is directly impacted by these changes, it’s not uncommon for primary audience personas to shift or change over the years.  

With an evolved understanding of your audience, you can accurately personalize your spring newsletter’s subject lines to appeal to different segments of your current consumer base. 

Be specific & direct with spring newsletter subject line CTAs

One of the most effective ways to show your recipients that an email was curated specifically for them is to modify the CTA language in the subject line.

Let’s say you’re an email marketer for a subscription-based SaaS company and want to target new leads and current customers. 

If a customer has been subscribed to your services for several years, they don’t expect to receive an email that leads with “Sign up.” In the same way, a lead who has never signed up for your services doesn’t expect to receive an email that leads with “Upgrade.”

This might seem like a small detail and an easy fix, but it’s these small details that signal to a recipient whether your email is worth their time or not. 

Tools for testing the quality of of your spring newsletter subject line copy 

Writing subject lines doesn’t have to be a purely creative endeavor. You can bring in data from other sources to arrive at a clickable first line for your newsletter. 

Here are two free resources for email marketers that are designed to help you check the quality of your subject lines before finalizing the email copy and scheduling the distribution. 

1. Net Atlantic’s Email Subject Line Grader 

2. The Advanced Marketing Institute’s Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer 

The subject lines included in the next section were taken directly from three business’ spring email campaigns postmarked March 2023. 

To put theory into practice, we’re running each of the subject lines through the Email Subject Line Grader and Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer tools to 

a) demonstrate how the tools work and 

b) discuss how effective each subject line is based on the tools’ ratings.

2023 Spring Newsletter Subject Lines 

Hello, Spring!🌷

Cheekwood Estate & Gardens used this subject line as part of its 2021 spring email campaign.

When vetted through the Email Subject Line Grader, here were the results:

• The copy earned a perfect score of 100 for subject line type, meaning that it would most likely perform better than a more neutral version. 

• Because the ideal length for a subject line is typically 50 characters, “Hello, Spring!🌷” scored lower for character count and word count. The tool recommended adding more length to improve the engagement results. 

• This tool records the action words in every subject line. For Cheekwood’s subject line, the only action word was “spring.” But because there were only two words in the subject line, action words accounted for 50% of the copy. 

The second tool mentioned in the previous section — the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer — is unique because it measures the emotional value of your messaging. 

Specifically, the tool ranks subject lines based on factors like intellect, empathy, and spirituality.  

Unfortunately, this tool can’t register Cheekwood’s subject line, and here’s why. 

As you can see here, a subject line has to be at least four words to be analyzed. Something you should also note is that this tool won’t factor emojis into the emotional value results. 

Put some Spring in your step with our new seasonal blend! 🌸

This email subject line was created by Chattanooga-based business, Wildflower Tea Shop & Apothecary. 

When vetted through the Email Subject Line Grader, the results were extremely positive on the whole:

• Like the previous subject line, the copy earned a score of 100 for subject line type.

• The character count was slightly below the tool’s 50-60 ideal at 49 characters. However, this is considered standard for the majority of subject lines. 

• The tool suggested that shortening the subject line could lead to a better response from recipients, but even still, this length is not too excessive. 

• Lastly, three action words were identified “spring,” “step,” and “blend” which brings the subject line’s average to 27.27%. 

Unlike the “Hello, Spring!🌷” subject line, Wildflower Tea Shop’s subject line was compatible with the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer tool.

This subject line earned a 27.27% score. Though this score might seem low, it’s actually a strong score when you consider that headlines and subject lines typically fall within the 30% to 40% range.

The tool also evaluated the quality of the copy and found that this subject line has “triple impact,” meaning that it appeals to recipients on an intellectual, empathetic, and spiritual level. 

 🍀 You’re In Luck! 🍀

The third subject line that we want to call attention to is “🍀 You’re In Luck! 🍀,” which was also sent out by Cheekwood Estate & Gardens.  

Though the copy earned a perfect score for subject line type via the Email Subject Line Grader, the tool pointed out a few specific ways that the copy could be improved:

• To start, the tool recommended that the character length (which is currently 17 characters) should be extended and the word count should be about six or seven words rather than three. 

• Another issue is that the tool didn’t pick up on any action words that carry emotion, action, or power. A lack of action words could negatively affect how recipients respond to the email. 

(But, on the other hand, this type of subject line could make people curious about the contents of the email and lead to higher open rates. Once again, the only way to find out for certain would be to run A/B tests.)

Just like the first Cheekwood email subject line, the results from the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer tool were inconclusive because this subject line doesn’t meet the minimum word count.

Things are looking spring

This subject line from Starbucks’ 2021 email marketing campaign. 

When vetted through the Email Subject Line Grader, the results are quite different than they were for the last three subject lines:  

• Though the previous subject lines scored 100 for subject line type, the copy for this one had a score of 67. The sentiment here was that the subject line was good but general. 

• As far as the character length and word count go, the tool recommended that a longer subject line could be more effective and utilize more action words.

• Speaking of action words, this subject line had a 25% rating with the action word “spring.”

According to the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer, the subject line’s copy scored 25% for emotional value — slightly below the score for “Put some Spring in your step with our new seasonal blend! 🌸.” 

The subject line’s key strength according to this tool was empathetic value, which can be very effective at bringing out “profound and strong positive emotional reactions.” 

Planning For Your Next Newsletter Campaign

While resources like the Email Subject Line Grader and Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer benefit email marketers, a best practice is still to give more power to A/B tests and their results.  

Through testing different versions of a subject line, you might discover that the version with a poor score on a tool like Email Subject Line Grader performs better than the version with a perfect score.  

The key takeaway here is to utilize your resources to their full extent so that you can be more informed and strategic when distributing your spring newsletter to your target audience.

Though these tools can help you predict the effectiveness of your subject line copy, an email marketing tool like Get a Newsletter helps you streamline the entire process — from generating new leads and formatting the newsletters with beautiful newsletter templates, to tracking engagement analytics.  

As this quarter leads into the next, it’s important to have a strong email marketing strategy set in place. With the right tools, you can ensure that your newsletter subject lines incentivize more engagement, not less.