Examples of Holiday Gift Guide Subject Lines that WORK — Plus a Few Duds to Avoid
Spoiler: Your subject line is THE most important part of your pitch, so use that real estate wisely!
Happy Friday! And L’shana tova!
It’s been a heck of a week over here: I spent Sun-Tuesday at a really great nutrition conference in Scottsdale (literally right down the street from my house) and somehow managed to come home from it with a cold. So I’ve been moving at half speed the last few days (cough, sniffle, repeat), doing my best to keep up with deadlines.
And one of those deadlines was based on last week’s Holiday Gift Guide Q&A Zoom with Aly and Alice: My promise to get you some examples of subject lines that have caught my attention this holiday gift guide season.
Btw, you can still watch that Zoom recording here:
In that Zoom, we briefly touched on subject lines, so I wanted to do a deeper dive on them here. Why? Because subject lines are literally the most important part of your pitch … it’s how writers with 400+ emails in their inbox daily instantly decide whether something is worth their time or not. You have 2 seconds to grab our attention, hook our interest, and make us feel like, “Oooh, I need to know more! Must click!”
Is that snap judgment fair? Should one really judge a book by its cover? Probably not, but it’s the reality of our bandwidth during the busiest season of the year. And you know I like to shoot it straight.
And in case you’re wondering how stiff the competition is for our attention right now: I put out a call for pitches earlier this week for a specific holiday gift guide and have received 227 pitches so far … and I only have 20-25 slots to fill.
So, let’s dive into some examples of real subject lines I’ve received over the last few weeks (some from today even) … I’ll explain WHY each one works and share ideas for how you can tailor your own. Plus, I’ll share a few duds that flopped and why you should avoid those formats. Finally, I’m opening my comment section up for you to run subject lines past me… I’m happy to offer real-time feedback!
Hitting the paywall? My 25% off sale for an annual subscription is still good through Monday! It’ll give you access to ALL my archived paywall content and future Zoom sessions.