Whether you sell men’s underwear, women’s underwear, shapewear, or other “unmentionables”, you need a strong email marketing strategy. You’ll need even stronger email subject lines for underwear retailers. 

Looking for the best underwear email subject lines for your underwear email marketing campaign? We have some tips to help you stand out in your customer’s inbox

6 Tips for Your Underwear Retail Email Subject Line

1. Have personality - Make a statement with the brand image you’re trying to create. Whether you keep it fun and cheeky or simple and clean, let your subject line carry your personality. 
2. Get to know your customer - Customize subject lines to give customers exactly what they’re looking for. Hint at their favorite style, something related to their most recent purchase, or something completely new you think they’d like. Make sure you differentiate between gender, age, and purchasing habits to segment your market.
3. Collaborate - Working with other brand partners opens you up to a whole new market. This strategy also grabs the attention of customers by sending something unexpected to their inbox.
4. Follow up - Let your email software do the work for you and send triggered emails for events like abandoned cart, birthdays, site browsing history, and more! Provide your customer a catered experience and make them feel like they’re the most important name on your list. Each triggered email will have its own subject line relevant to its goal.
5. Funnel to your CTA - Set a clear goal for your email marketing campaign and measure the results. Your end goal is conversion through clicks in the email, so make sure everything funnels down to that, including your subject line, your email content, even the text on your CTA button.
6. Test a lot - Utilize techniques like A/B testing to see what subject lines perform best with your audiences and improve your conversion rates.

Why is it so important to nail your email subject line?

Even in 2023, email is still a very effective tool for marketing your brand. Last year HubSpot reported that “77% of companies have seen more engagement with email marketing over the past 12 months.” And for every $1 spent on email marketing, there is a $36 return on investment. 

If you’re not leveraging your email marketing capabilities, you could be losing out on many potential sales and influence.

How can you increase your conversion rates? Let’s start with the subject line. Email marketing is crucial to any online retail business and the subject line is the very first thing customers read in a message from you. According to Invesp, “47% of email recipients open email based on the subject line alone.” 

From your email message to its design to its subject line, you want one cohesive message that drives a customer to your website and ultimately to purchase.

6 Tips for Your Underwear Retail Email Subject Line

Have Personality

MeUndies is an often-highlighted underwear brand because it has personality. The MeUndies shopping experience is fun and casual, making customers feel more comfortable and welcome. They also engage their customers and invite them to take part in the brand. 

“The ecommerce-based underwear brand regularly encourages interaction with its followers through its #MeUndiesModel campaign as a call to action to submit user-generated content (UGC),” says agency Digital Media Solutions (DMS). 

Customers get to make the brand their own. The best brands don’t just sell products, they become a lifestyle. Undergarment retail is a strong contender for lifestyle-brand potential because it is so personal.

Subject lines allow you to show a bit of your personality too. Whether you are a little cheeky, or like to keep it clean and formal, you can write teasers that stand out in what you are. No matter your style, be sure to invite customers into the experience with your brand and make them feel comfortable with a more intimate area of shopping.

Get to Know Your Customer

Everyone has their undergarment preferences, and getting to know the preferences of your customers can help you steer them toward purchases. You might not ask them directly what style of underwear they prefer (or maybe you do when they sign up), but you can definitely track their purchase and site browsing history and deliver a catered gallery to their inbox. 

“It’s essential that brands focus on staying true to their messaging, promoting values that resonate with growing audience segments and deploying strategies that align with evolving needs of their target markets,” says agency DMS. 

A personalized subject line that includes their specific interests will grab more attention than a generic subject line.

Collaborate

Another innovative men’s underwear brand, SAXX, collaborated with 2020 meme icon Dude With Sign to create an exclusive line. Collaboration exposes your brand to a whole new customer base. Subject lines are a great way to promote any collaboration. When your customers recognize other unexpected names in their inbox, they’ll definitely be intrigued.

Follow up

Triggered emails are communications automatically sent after an action or event, such as a loaded cart or a birthday. Setting up these hands-off communications is a great way to connect with customers and give them a personalized experience with not much work on your end.

One kind of triggered email is sent after a customer fills their cart and then closes the tab on your website. Email My Cart emails have proven to be an effective tool for increasing conversion rates. Barilliance found Email My Cart messages to have the highest conversion rate of automated trigger emails, translating to sales 24.58% of the time. “On a per email basis, Email My Cart campaigns generated 54.9% more revenue per email than the second highest converting campaign type.” That’s a lot of bang in one email. 

MeUndies takes advantage of this strategy as well. 

“Underwear company MeUndies uses the email welcome offer as a constant reminder to non-purchasers to make that first purchase. By using conditional logic in their email set up and design, MeUndies effectively reminds non-purchasers of that discount every chance they get,” says marketing agency Barrel.

But the same cannot be said for much of the retail industry. “Unfortunately, many companies do not employ the highest converting email types. In fact, Email My Cart represents less than 1% of total sent emails in our database,” says Barilliance.

These are significant potential sales to miss out on! Set up automated emails that do the work for you, yet are still highly personal and by definition catered to the customer. And a personalized email requires a personalized subject line. Create subject lines tailored to the type of triggered email, or even better, tailored to the kinds of items in your customer’s cart or in their browse history on your site. If they looked at it once and thought about buying it, chances are good they’ll want to take a second look.

Funnel to Your CTA

Every piece of your email campaign, from themes to content to subject lines, should funnel down to your call-to-action (CTA). Each email campaign should have a specific goal in mind, whether it be a conversion rate, sales goal, or site traffic goal. That goal should be clearly defined before you send your email so you can determine if it’s achieving its purpose or not. 

The subject line is a key piece of the email and should be evaluated alongside every other element of the campaign. Ask yourself:

• Is the subject line helping achieve the overall goal? If you have low open rates, the answer may be no. 
• How can you improve your subject lines? Primarily, you can use a tool to help you think outside the box. In fact, Backstroke generates engaging subject lines that can help you make your conversion dreams come true. 

Another way to steer your subject lines to success is to test what works for your audience. Speaking of . . .

Test. A Lot.

According to MailChimp, “The best way to know what resonates with your subscribers is to try different things in your marketing emails.” 

They recommend A/B testing your subject lines to see which perform better. This means dividing your audience into two or more groups and sending different subject lines to each group and seeing which one performs better. 

“A/B testing should be a part of your email marketing strategy not only to improve your email marketing statistics but to deliver email users the content they want in a way that is appealing to them.”

A/B email testing requires multiple subject lines, of course. To save yourself the hassle of coming up with them on your own, a tool like Backstroke can generate the options you need. Generate 15 free subject lines for your brand right now.