01 Apr 2024 -
Spintax is a great deliverability tool to add variance and differentiation to your email copy. Most folks don’t know that you can also spin your subject lines to add more variety to the email content.
In my previous blogs on personalized subject lines and how to write cold email subject lines, I discussed spintax usage in subjects.
In this blog, we dive deeper into Spintax and its usage in subject lines. But before we learn to use Spintax, let us understand what it is and why it is important.
Spintax is short for spinning syntax. Spintax simplifies the generation of sentence or word variations, enabling you to produce a more customized and varied collection of cold emails for your leads.
The syntax for writing Spintax is easy. You need to create variations of sentences that you want to include or randomize within curly braces { }, and then separate each sentence with the pipe operator.
For example, if you are writing an introduction line or a greeting, you could spin a couple of variations like this -
{Hey,Hi,Hello,Howdy} , {Saw that you recently joined Acme Corp, Since it has been three months since you joined Acme, Saw that you joined Acme as the new head of marketing}, so I reached out.
For the above example, 12 unique sentences will be created using the spins supplied. It is based on permutations, where the greeting has four possibilities and the intro line has three possibilities.
Spintax chooses one item within the braces randomly and presents it. So, in this case, there will be 4*3=12 possible sentences.
Note: The actual syntax for Spintax might vary depending on the email outreach software that you are using. The above example corresponds to Spintax usage in Smarltead.
As you can see in the example above, spinning a few greetings and intro lines gave us 12 unique sentences. These sentences add variance within the email content that is going out of our email inboxes. When email service providers see that you have been sending different messages, you have a reduced chance of being marked as spam.
Spintax also allows you to test what tones work best for your cold emails. Using different types of CTAs, varied openings, and tones you can figure out the responsiveness of your prospects for each type of message.
Most smart cold emailers and sales reps use Spintax in their email content. But, there’s also a case for using spintax in cold email subject lines.
Volume-wise you might be doing 20-30 emails a day/account. That means around 150 new prospects a week and around 500-600 new prospects every month. If you want to test whether your email copy is effective or not, you probably need to test such copy and angle for a couple of months at such volume.
And if you keep the subject line the same for emails that are going out of your inbox for 2-3 months and send it to 2000-3000 people, you can be sure that it is going to hurt email deliverability.
That’s where spintax for subject lines can be useful.
Greetings are a great way to spin your cold email subject lines given that you are probably going to use them in a lot of your sequences. If you are using a generic subject line like “Quick Question” or “Question, “ or , thoughts?” then you can use a greeting along with the subject.
For example, you can use {Hi,Hey,Howdy,Hello}, - {quick question,question,thoughts?,opinions?}
With the above spins, you can generate 16 unique subject lines. Now if you are sending emails to 600 prospects a month and if you use just this one spin you can ensure that each subject line is sent to just ~38 people in a month.
You can also spin the topics that you are reaching out to a prospect. For example, you might be selling software in a particular business area or a service that does something. Use variations of the description of the product or the service in your subject line to add more variance to your email content.
Let’s say you are selling a lead generation database. Here’s how you can spin your subject line based on the topic of outreach.
{lead generation,sales intelligence,leads,contact details,b2b leads,leads database} and that gives you 6 unique subject lines immediately.
Of course, you can spin the topics along with first names, company names, or your company name.
You can put two to three-word phrases as questions in your subject lines around your area of concern. Continuing with our lead generation software example, you could ask a few questions like these.
Such questions about your product or service area can help you spin subject lines with ease.
If you have created an email list of prospects who went to a specific school, had a specific degree, or had some personal accomplishments in their workplace you can use that to spin the subject lines.
Again continuing with our “lead generation software” example, here’s how you can target a Head of Sales or VP of Sales with spintax subject lines.
Some subject lines to include in the spintax can be -
You can spin subject lines based on the traits and characteristics of your target accounts. And much of these account characteristics can be uncovered from their website or company descriptions on social media platforms.
One thing to remember is that when using account characteristics you will have to ensure that you club accounts with similar characteristics together. This is important so that you don’t claim something that isn’t true about a company.
For example, if you are reaching out to companies that have raised a round recently, segregate based on what round have they raised recently.
So you can spin your subject lines like - {series A, your latest round, your funding} for companies that recently raised a series A and {seed round, your latest round, your funding, post seed growth} for companies that recently raised a seed.
Spintax is now a commonly available feature in all outreach automation software for email content but there are a few providers that allow spintax in subject lines too.
Here are a few of them -
Hope you now have some ideas on how to add spintax to your subject lines to get more responses and hit your deliverability metrics.