Email subject-line variants

Purpose

Create a disciplined set of subject lines and preview texts that represent the actual email, cover distinct messaging angles, and can support a clean test.

Scope

The skill covers angle design, variants, length and tone checks, prohibited language, audience fit, and test design.

Excluded: sending tests, choosing winners from absent data, and manipulating recipients with false urgency.

Data basis

• Final email or campaign brief supplied as an input.
• Audience, brand guide, channel rules and prior results in scope.

Result

A variant sheet and test-plan brief.

Quality criteria

• Each variant is accurate, distinct and labelled by angle.
• Preview text adds information rather than repeating the subject.
• Length, tone, claim and compliance rules are checked.
• Test comparisons change one defined variable at a time.

Instructions

Use the email's strongest reader benefit and preserve its actual offer. Avoid clickbait, unsupported personalization, and urgency not grounded in a real deadline. Treat historical performance as context, not proof of future success.

Adapt before use

• Add email, audience, brand and channel rules.
• Define length, prohibited terms and test constraints.
• Add prior results and metric definitions.
• Keep source facts, analysis, recommendations, and unresolved questions visibly separate.
• Preserve stable document, section, page, sentence, URL, or row identifiers in every finding.
• Record assumptions about audience, channel, period, approval status, and data coverage.
• Treat missing guidance as an adaptation gap rather than inventing a company rule.
• Prefer a precise, bounded recommendation over a broad generic rewrite.
• Use supplied terminology consistently across the document, sheet, and any derivative copy.
• Do not infer performance, customer behavior, product capability, or market response from wording alone.
• Make every unresolved issue actionable by naming the missing decision, evidence, owner, or source.
• Keep factual claims traceable even when the final copy is concise.
• Recheck that counts, names, dates, and identifiers match across all outputs.
• Mark hypotheses as hypotheses and preserve competing explanations when evidence is mixed.
• Use the stated acceptance criteria as the final completeness check.