The secret of writing a great headline is to steal inspiration and adapt it.
This is why the best copywriters keep a handy swipe file. Whenever needed, they use this file to break free from their rut.
Or you can use ours. The following 71 REAL headline examples will get any copywriter unstuck.
We’ve also grouped these headlines into 7 distinctive categories so you can more easily refer to them.
Homepage Headlines
Homepage headlines are the first thing a new customer sees about your business. If your headlines are engaging, they’ll remember your brand and recommend your website to friends and family. If your headlines are bland and boring, a new prospect will immediately click away and forget about your site in a single day.
Here are 10 of the best homepage headlines to make your company stand out:
1. “Make smarter decisions with the Nerds by your side” (Nerdwallet)
The team back at Nerdwallet understands their target audience down to a tee. The use of keywords such as “smarter” and “nerds” tells the incoming users two things: first, it showcases the most important aspect of personal finance—to make smarter decisions with the money you have (or you’re about to get).
Second, it exemplifies the wisdom of experienced professionals (cleverly disguised as “nerds”) and how they can help you achieve your financial goals. This information is implicit, making the headline more engaging and real.
Key takeaway: Make sure you get to know how your target audience thinks and behaves online, so you can write better headlines to attract your ideal users and filter out the people who aren’t interested in your business.
2. “Refreshingly simple project management” (Basecamp)
Basecamp is the leader in workplace effectiveness, productivity, and simplicity. Its homepage reflects these three values by featuring a clear and concise headline that tells prospects everything they need to know in a single line of text.
To Basecamp’s credit, it’s much easier to come up with a concise headline when you have an award-winning SaaS project management solution to back up your marketing claims. And the team behind it managed to accomplish just that.
Key takeaway: You don’t need to be fancy in order to write effective headlines. Sometimes, the best headlines are the most simple ones, but they have to be genuine and reflect the values of your products and services to make them work.
3. “We sue bad bosses” (ELC Maryland)
In a highly competitive industry like legal, there’s little room for marketing hiccups. Even a slight error in your branding message can cost you hundreds of potential clients and thousands if not millions in lost revenue.
Thankfully, ELC Maryland’s website knows the drawbacks of poorly implemented copywriting techniques and does exactly the opposite. Its headline “We sue bad bosses” signals the firm’s readiness to take action against the white-collar perpetrators of today’s society in a heartbeat.
It’s emotional, poignant, and memorable—a demonstrable winner and a true rarity in the legal world.
Key takeaway: Great headlines often appeal to readers’ emotions, urging them to take action immediately to prevent the negativity from overwhelming their daily lives. Use an emotional sentiment (positive or negative) in your headlines to increase their urgency and improve your homepage’s conversion rates in the long run.
4. “The life upgrade you didn’t know you needed” (Rocco Fridge)
The PAS (Problem, Agitation, Solution) copywriting framework teaches aspiring copywriters to reveal a problem the customers never knew they were dealing with in the first place, escalate that problem to the point of frustration, and deliver the solution to that problem in the form of your product or service.
The creators of Rocco’s Smart Fridge’s online media presence took this advice to heart and translated those same words onto the site’s homepage to serve as its featured headline: “The life upgrade you didn’t know you needed.” This is the problem.
The agitation part comes from the homepage’s subheading: “But won’t be able to host without.”
The final part of the PAS formula is omitted but heavily implied in the call to action (CTA) copy: “Shop for home + commercial spaces.”
Key takeaway: Use formulas like PAS to improve your copy and create successful headlines every time.
5. “A cleaner way to take out the trash” (Plastno)
Plastno uses eco-friendly keywords (“cleaner”, “take out the trash”) to announce its noble messaging and raise awareness for the most important challenge that humanity faces in the modern age—preserving our environment. It’s a good way to introduce newcomers to the company’s biodegradable bags without being too smug (although, they also use “smug” in one of their subheadings).
If we’re being extra scrupulous, Plastno’s only con is that the product’s name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Key takeaway: Use modern-day issues to increase your headlines’ discoverability while raising awareness about your products, as long as their sentiments fall within each other’s lines.
6. “A creator of sound. From pure noise to melody. Everyday life is her symphony.” (Chiara Luzzana)
How do you stand out in a field like sound design, where thousands of equally talented professionals compete to get the next lucrative gig? The answer: by getting an accomplished art director (Niccolò Miranda) to create a memorable interactive online experience for your target audience.
Sound designer Chiara Luzzana’s headline is unorthodox, mysterious, and long. It breaks all the rules of copywriting but does it with style. It speaks directly to the people responsible for hiring atypical talent by using the power of threes: “sound”, “melody”, and “symphony.” Lastly, the brash typeface emboldens the experience and gives Chiara a slight edge over her competing peers.
Key takeaway: Copywriting, like chess, is about learning all the rules and breaking them when necessary. It’s ok to go against the common wisdom as long as you have an award-winning professional to back up your headline idea. Otherwise, stick to the fundamentals.
7. “Donuts, Donuts, Donuts” (Plunder and Poach Donuts)
John Caples, a direct response copywriting legend, had this idea about different headline categories and how to use them effectively to get people’s attention. One of his categories includes extremely short headlines consisting of one-, two-, or there-word headlines. Here, the Plunder and Poach Donuts team are implementing Caples’s advice flawlessly.
Key takeaway: Use John Caples’s one-, two-, or three-word headlines to get your audience’s attention. Then, use a copywriting formula like AIDA to keep them engaged until the end of your copy. Lastly, use a compelling CTA to get them to purchase your product or subscribe to your service.
8. “The Dockyard is a Social Dining Experience. Eat, drink and have fun with Your friends.” (Dockyard Social)
In all fairness, this represents Dockyard Social’s second page when you scroll down below the fold. But, they might as well feature it as their main headline, because it’s just that good.
The headline explains the social aspect of the dining experience, which also doubles as the experimental restaurant’s main benefit. It’s an interesting concept for the average person and a hell on earth for exceptionally introverted individuals.
Key takeaway: You can always give a small taste of your offer’s main benefits in your headlines, but don’t spoil too much. Keep the meat of your unique selling point (USP) tightly under wraps until you’ve generated enough interest to sell your prospects on your offer.
9. “Burnout & isolation are not part of your job description” (Zen Founder)
Zen Founder helps entrepreneurs healthily manage stress in their daily lives. It offers tools, stats, and advice on thriving in challenging business circumstances without losing oneself. Founders and managers who struggle with burnout will immediately recognize how Dr. Walling’s business can help them achieve the extremely sought-after zen state.
Key takeaway: Clearly address your audience’s pain points in your headlines to maximize the chances of attracting the right clients.
10. “Nourish Your Body, Elevate Your Life” (Whole Harvest)
Whole Harvest states a general truth about health in a playful and catchy way. It gambles on the prospect of organic exposure if and when its headline becomes wildly popular. Whether or not the slogan catches on remains to be seen.
Key takeaway: Implement catchy phrases, slogans, and mottos in your headlines to create a unique calling card for your brand. This method won’t always work, but when it does, it’ll be equivalent to paying for a powerful branding campaign that you’ll get almost for free.
Sales Page Headlines
A well-written sales page headline will capture your audience’s attention and set them on the path of becoming recurring customers. On the flip side, a badly composed sales page headline will deter your prospects from ever visiting your store. Or, they won’t notice your headline in the first place and won’t read the copy that follows after it.
These are prime examples of the top 10 attention-grabbing sales page headlines from across the web:
11. “Why Is This Shark Tank Investor Giving Away His $7.8 Billion Dollar Client Getting ‘Unicorn Funnel’ In His Controversial Bestselling Book” (Sell Like Crazy)
Written by Sabri Suby, this sales page headline might initially seem too long for the uninitiated members of direct response advertising. However, ultra-specific headlines tend to perform better than generic ones. Sabri’s effort went toward writing the most specific headline he could come up with to promote his selling manual—aptly named “Sell Like Crazy”.
Key takeaway: Create your headlines to be as specific as possible, as these types of headlines perform better than generic ones.
12. “Learn My Time-Saving Eating Secrets And See A Day Of My Meals Broken Down So You Can Copy Me…” (Betty Rocker)
It’s always a good idea to bring your headline (and copy) down to a more personal level so people can say to themselves: “This person is being open, honest, and willing to help me achieve my goals. Why shouldn’t I give their product or service a try?”
Applying this strategy tastefully and candidly can work wonders for your sales page conversions over the long haul.
Key takeaway: Benefits-oriented headlines perform well in a variety of cases, food and nutrition being the most obvious ones. Try to write a benefit-oriented headline in the first person to address the reader more openly and to make it more tempting for them to engage with your page.
13. “How to Get Your First 5,000 Subscribers” (Blog That Converts)
Blog That Converts is a combination of techniques, methodologies, and approaches that all but promise to net your first 5K subscribers or add another 5K subscribers to your existing customer list. It has been developed by Derek Halpern, featuring a straightforward headline that specifically targets aspiring entrepreneurs who struggle to get their business off the ground and scale it to that highly coveted 5,000 subscriber mark.
Key takeaway: Make an enticing value proposition for your readers so they can’t resist reading the rest of the copy.
14. “Build Your Own 6-Figure Business Leveraging The World’s Largest Online Mall” (Amazing Selling Machine)
Quitting your job and starting a business is not an easy task. It requires high-risk tolerance, lots of nerves, and some luck to pull it off and set yourself up for good. Matt Clark’s Amazing Selling Machine offers all of the above by promising financial freedom for prospects willing to try his program.
Plus, he uses a number in his headline, making it more likely to perform well than a similar headline without one.
Key takeaway: Use numbers in your headlines to improve their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) and to increase your headlines’ click-through rates (CTR).
15. “Learn How to Get More Traffic and Subscribers From Your Blog (Using a Proven, Step-By-Step System)” (Grow Your Blog Fast)
Brian Dean, of former Backlinko fame, is a proven authority figure in the SEO world. He’s known for coming up with comprehensive guides on search engine optimization that are easy for both professionals and newcomers alike to understand.
However, this is not why one of his headlines ended on our list. If you look closely, you can notice your eyes are immediately drawn to the headline without any particular rhyme or reason.
The secret? It’s all about breaking up your headlines into smaller, more dynamic chunks with various carefully placed punctuation marks.
Key takeaway: Use punctuation marks (colon, semicolon, parenthesis, hyphen, en-dash, em-dash) in your headlines to make them more dynamic and interesting for your readers.
16. “The Potent Eastern Elixir That Targets Stubborn Fat Quickly & Easily” (Nagano Tonic)
Readers like a good story. They respond well to mystery and anticipation because the story speaks to their fears of the unknown and provides solutions for overcoming them. This is why a long-form sales page is arguably more powerful than a shorter copy (with some exceptions).
Nagano Tonic employs these principles into practice by using keywords such as “potent”, “eastern”, and “elixir” in its headline. It sounds like the brand is unearthing a long-forgotten secret from the vaults of an ancient culture to help modern consumers lead healthier lives.
Key takeaway: Tell a compelling story in your headlines to generate interest in your potential buyers. Then, add a level of mystery and anticipation to make your copy even more effective.
17. “The World’s Only Crystal Water Bottles Created To Re-Charge Water So That It Can Help Support Healthy Weight Loss!” (Slim Crystal)
Healing crystals are controversial, but we’re not here to denounce or endorse this industry either way. From a marketing perspective, Slim Crystal’s headline is very effective in creating scarcity to increase people’s interest in its product.
If this is indeed the “only” product that can help individuals achieve a highly coveted weight loss goal, then why should your target audience stop themselves from buying it?
Key takeaway: Create scarcity to drive more interest. But, don’t rely too much on this strategy because it can backfire and leave you with heaps of unsold inventory, tanking your revenue in the process.
18. “Now You Can Build ANY Shed In A Weekend Even If You’ve Zero Woodworking Experience!” (My Shed Plans)
Products such as competitive gaming equipment, high-resolution audio hardware, or professional woodworking tools might seem like impractical pastimes for newcomers in any of these fields. People wanting to participate in them might seem overwhelmed by the sheer amount of contradictory information, high costs, and lack of support, making it almost impossible for a new member to participate.
How about using this notion to your advantage?
Key takeaway: Make your headlines beginner-friendly for people who aren’t experts in your industry. By showing a willingness to support newcomers and helping them achieve their goals, you’ll capture a wider group of prospects who would’ve been otherwise deterred because of a high barrier to entry.
19. “Boring marketing resources that help businesses & agencies grow fast” (ClickMinded)
ClickMinded was founded by Tommy Griffith, a former Airbnb SEO director who managed to grow his platform from a modest side hustle into a multi-million dollar business. Today, it serves more than 50K agencies, businesses, and individuals across various industries and niches.
The strength of ClickMinded is the quality of its product, not the wittiness of its headline. This fact carries over to the headline itself: “Boring marketing resources that help businesses & agencies grow fast.” A traditional headline + an excellent product is usually better than a stellar headline paired with a mediocre product.
Key takeaway: In this case, having a well-established product speaks louder than pouring hours into creating a cute and memorable headline. Make sure you build the right product for your target market, then allocate the remainder of your time and budget to promoting it to the masses.
20. “They Laughed When I Told Them I’d Make Millions From Facebook Ads, Until I Did.” (Connectio)
Seasoned practitioners of direct response copywriting might recognize this headline as a modern adaptation of John Caples’s famous piano advert: “They laughed when I sat at the piano—But when I started to play!” Connectio’s headline follows Mr. Caples’s formula beat for beat, but instead of piano lessons, it offers a more efficient way to run Facebook ads.
Key takeaway: Steal inspiration from the greats (John Caples, David Ogilvy, Joe Sugarman), but don’t just copy and paste their headlines. Instead, adapt them to serve your brand and play to your business’s strengths.
Landing Page Headlines
The difference between landing pages and sales pages is that all sales pages are landing pages, but not all landing pages are necessarily equivalent to sales pages. For example, a landing page can exist to generate awareness or interest (in exchange for contact information), but not to sell a product.
Lately, the lines between homepages, landing pages, and sales pages have been blurred to a point where all three are similar and can be easily mistaken by the untrained eye.
Here are 10 examples of the most notable landing page headlines to nip any misconceptions in the bud:
21. “Join the millions learning to code with Codecademy for free” (Codecademy)
Codecademy (not Codeacademy!) keeps things simple: users must enter their email address to sign up for its services. At the end of the headline, the Codecademy team promises free entry for new users, creating an enticing reason for them to begin their coding journey as soon as they finish reading the headline.
Key takeaway: You can incentivize prospects to give out their contact information for a free goodie, like an ebook or a bonus chapter from your upcoming course.
22. “What if Your Most Human-Centric Leader is a Machine?” (Gartner)
This is a landing page for a leadership webinar hosted on Gartner, a tech company based in Stamford, CT. The headline embodies all properties of a clear CTR winner: a unique value proposition, a mysterious hook, and a premise teetering on the verge of hard sci-fi. It makes users stop dead in their tracks to check out the course.
Key takeaway: Make your headlines as unique as they can be. If you can find a way to differentiate your headlines from those of your closest competitors, people will start noticing your brand more. In turn, search engines will begin putting your landing pages on top of their SERPs thanks to their organic boost in popularity.
23. “A radical approach to content management.” (Statamic)
Statamic is a Laravel-based, modern content management system (CMS), so its landing page presentation naturally pushes for a more visually eccentric design compared to a classical sales letter from the 90s. However, even without the pop art imagery and flashy visuals, its headline still manages to make a good first impression and draw more than a few eyeballs where it matters the most.
Key takeaway: Use power keywords like “radical” to raise some eyebrows, reduce your bounce rate, and demonstrate the raison d’etre of your landing page.
24. “Superior insights. Delivered fast.” (Survicate)
Survicate’s headline is brimming with personality and charm. But, that doesn’t stop the page from communicating its message clearly and effectively to interested clients. In other words, Survicate doesn’t let its headline get in the way of its core business offer—intuitive surveys that give superior insights.
Key takeaway: Make your headlines exude your product’s personality, but don’t forget to put your brand’s messaging at the front and center of your offer. If your headlines’ semantics overshadow your message, you risk confusing your prospects and inadvertently pushing them away for good.
25. “Your Kind of Healthy” (Sunbasket)
At first, Sunbasket’s headline doesn’t look like it has much to offer. On second viewing, however, you can see how the page speaks directly to the reader: “Your Kind of Healthy.”
This strategy helps build customer rapport and signal that your business cares for their needs.
Key takeaway: Speak directly to the reader to get your point across. Addressing them in the second person (singular or plural) helps make your headlines more personalized than speaking in a neutral tone (third person).
26. “How Much Should I Charge For Rent?” (Zillow)
Zillow’s landing page is designed to generate leads for the company’s renting business. Its copy is shorter than average, but that doesn’t stop it from converting well. The reason? It starts with an interrogative adverb, which is a word designed to elicit organic interest in attentive readers.
Key takeaway: Use interrogative adverbs like “how”, “why”, and “when” to start your headlines with. This will create a sense of anticipation in your prospects to make them want to read your copy fully and eventually convert.
27. “How 35 Marketers Would Grow Website Visitors From 0-10K In 30 Days” (BDOW!)
BDOW!’s headline uses techniques like odd numbers, punctuation, and interrogative adverbs, but that’s not why we chose to put it here. Namely, the headline’s main premise rests on the target audience’s desired outcome and the time it takes to achieve that result.
Key takeaway: Combine your desired outcome with a seemingly unachievable timeframe to produce an appealing results-oriented headline.
28. “How to Create a Landing Page (In 9 Easy Steps)” (GetResponse)
This page lives in GetResponse’s “blog” subfolder, but it still counts as a landing page because it features a prominent CTA, it’s structured like a landing page, and it also reads like one as well (not to mention it ranking high for its respective keywords and keyword phrases).
Anyway, the main selling point of the headline is that it’s self-referential: it talks about itself while existing as a separate entity outside of its meaning. Confused? Don’t worry: Meta headlines are designed to play with the readers’ minds and scratch their puzzle-solving itches.
Key takeaway: Don’t be afraid to go a little meta in order to flip the existing headline conventions on their head. Just don’t overdo this tactic and you’ll be fine.
29. “Azure IoT” (Microsoft Azure IoT)
Well-established brands can often get away with being less creative than their smaller indirect or potential future competitors. In fact, Jaguar has recently proven that radical rebrands can hurt the brand more than they help, so it’s better to make incremental changes than reinventing your entire brand identity from scratch—headlines included.
Key takeaway: Giant brands like Microsoft don’t need to be witty, catchy, or cute with their landing page headlines. If you happen to be one of the Big Five (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft), keeping things professional is the best (and often preferred) way to go.
30. “Discover restaurants and more near you.” (DoorDash)
Businesses like legal offices, home repair contractors, and food trucks are known to operate locally or state-wide. For these types of companies, it’s better to concentrate on capturing the local market instead of competing on a country-wide level.
Key takeaway: If your business operates on a local level, make sure to emphasize this fact in your landing page headlines. Use keywords such as “near you”, your local area, or a combination of your city and your business category (i.e., “san diego catering near me”).
Article Headlines
Articles, blog posts, listicles, essays, and other popular forms of written expression have more leeway regarding their headline structure. In marketing, article headlines run the gamut from funny and preposterous to sterile and dead serious.
Despite that, the best-performing articles are typically ones that:
- Offer valuable information to readers
- Are written by experts in their field
- Feature a captivating headline that elicits a strong urge to click on the result and read the entire thing
Better put, there’s a strong correlation between an engaging article headline and its corresponding CTR in the SERPs. The following 10 article headline examples are living proof of just that:
31. “7 tips to get started in weight training” (Redbull)
Redbull, an energy drink, managed to snatch an unlikely SERP win in the weightlifting space by following the rules of constructing a clickable article headline. This one contains an odd number, a stimulating value proposition, and a rationale-inciting word: “tips.”
Key takeaway: Use rationale-inciting words such as tips, tricks, times, lessons, ways, and takeaways. These words encourage the user to click on your headline and read your post.
32. “Can You Find What’s Wrong With These 10 Pictures?” (Brightside)
There’s just something in the human psyche that yearns to identify the proverbial needle in a haystack, as demonstrated by the proliferation of “spot the difference-type” games across the web.
Brightside smartly translates this fact into its headline, creating a fun, trivia-based invitation currently holding the number one spot for its corresponding exact match search query.
Key takeaway: Employ a fun trivia question in your headlines to stimulate curiosity and drive more interest.
33. “Choose The New “Mean Girls” Cast And We’ll Reveal Why You Can’t Sit With The Plastics” (Buzzfeed)
Despite its clickbaity reputation, Buzzfeed is a case study in how to write engaging headlines that convert. One of Buzzfeed’s community members developed this quiz-article hybrid, capitalizing on the audience’s urge to become active participants in their favorite outlet’s publications.
Key takeaway: Interactive headlines can help your blog create user engagement organically and consistently, weeding out those who aren’t interested in your posts.
34. “Why Strong Customer Relationships Trump Powerful Brands” (Harvard Business Review)
As copywriters, there are some days when you just can’t develop an effective headline. On days like those, it’s better to use a proven formula than stare at your screen for hours and waste your valuable time.
Key takeaway: Use the “Why Subject X Is Better Than Subject Y” formula to create magnetic headlines when you lack inspiration.
35. “Why Happy People Cheat” (The Atlantic)
Pattern interruption is a powerful technique. In the marketing and advertising world, it can disrupt a prospect’s habits, replace them with a new action, and slowly ease them into your offer until they’re ready to convert.
For example, when someone is doomscrolling, they engage in a habitual behavior. A shocking headline can disrupt their pattern and make them break the cycle. If the rest of your copy is as engaging as your headline, you can turn this prospect into a new customer when they finish reading your article.
Key takeaway: Use a shocking reveal in your headlines to catch people off guard, break their existing habits, and create a reason for them to click on your articles.
36. “Warren Buffett Made His Fortune ‘Sort Of By Accident,’ According To His Daughter. Loving What He Did Led To Unexpected Wealth” (Yahoo Finance)
If your headline doesn’t have a strong enough foundation to stand firmly on its own, why not introduce an authority figure with a proven track record to inject some intensity into it? A recognizable person at the top of their game will be a great conduit to draw more eyeballs to your article.
Key takeaway: Use a proven authority figure in your respective field to introduce a level of trustworthiness in your headlines.
37. “No, You Don’t Have to Eat Less to Lose Weight” (Penn State Health)
Often, people are being critical for a good reason. If you can identify those reasons, address them preemptively in your headlines. As soon as you acknowledge an opposing argument, prospects will become more willing to hear your story.
Key takeaway: Preemptively address common objections about the subject you will discuss in your main piece. Readers, especially proponents of that same objection, will feel heard and approach your post with an open mind.
38. “Does your novel pass the readability test?” (Apollo Pad)
This headline employs a similar tactic as in our 32nd entry, but they’re not quite the same. Instead of injecting a trivia question that requires active participation, you can also devise a test for your target audience to jostle their interest and passively stimulate their curiosity.
Key takeaway: Create a test for your prospects to improve your CTRs in a more roundabout way.
39. “Is Platinum Better Than Gold?” (Diamond Mansion)
Comparison sites exist for a reason: people are often unsure which product to buy. This is especially true if there are two competitors that offer similar products at a comparable price point, like Nvidia vs AMD graphics cards, or AMD vs Intel CPUs (although, it seems like Intel is lately botching the job).
In any case, pitting two of the most popular products on the market against each other, in any given industry, can provide you with a slight edge over your competitors who chase the same audience.
Key takeaway: Compare two similar products or services, but don’t forget to emphasize the methodology in your headlines. The more in-depth your comparison is, the more likely it’ll be for someone to check out the remainder of your article instead of bouncing immediately from your site.
40. “Intel’s Core i9 CPUs are still having some serious issues – but Intel insists it’s your motherboard’s fault” (TechRadar)
Speaking of Intel, have you heard the news? Their latest 13th and 14th-gen CPUs have been having voltage instability issues, on top of a factory defect that causes an increased oxidation incidence, leading them to run hotter than average and causing problems for gamers, content creators, and server admins alike. Are you interested in learning more?
Key takeaway: Capitalize on current news to get more exposure. If you run a news outlet, this should be your main strategy 24/7.
Email Subject Lines
Email subject lines are key for the success of your email marketing campaigns. They determine whether recipients will open the email, ignore it, send it to the trash, or label it as spam.
In addition, an exceptional subject line can contribute up to a 10% boost over your average email open rates, which is nothing to sneeze at. If you send 500 emails a week, that’s 50 more emails opened (and hopefully, read) added to your existing baseline.
Here are 10 real email subject lines to get inspired by:
41. “🥳 Cyber Savings extended: 50% off Grammarly Pro” (Grammarly)
Discount-related subject lines are enticing for prospects because they offer additional value for a reduced price. From the customer’s perspective, they’re getting more for less. Plus, shoppers don’t have to search for a special discount because it arrived straight to their inbox, or, in other words, IT found THEM.
Key takeaway: Include special discounts in your subject lines to see quick and easy improvements in your email open rates.
42. “Introducing a Google Docs integration, styles and more in Claude.ai” (Anthropic)
Anthropic’s Claude LLM recently emerged as one of the top competitors to OpenAI’s ChatGPT model. People who’ve opted in to receive Anthropic’s email newsletter have already been pre-screened and grouped into information or sales-qualified leads.
This type of audience doesn’t need to be pandered to with catchy subject lines because they’re way past that phase in the sales/marketing funnel.
Key takeaway: Sending emails to subscribers is a different ball game than blasting off a cold email outreach campaign. If you know people are already interested in your products or services, it’s best to keep them up to speed with your latest developments via a well-constructed, straightforward, and descriptive email subject line.
43. “AI startup optimizes flying” (Wellfound)
Wellfound’s email subject lines have two things going for them: they’re useful AND they’re extremely witty. In fact, they’re so useful in summing up the latest tech news that our team members haven’t dared to delegate Wellfound’s emails to the spam folder yet.
Key takeaway: Using witty language without dropping into cringe territory is a rare skill. If you can mimic Wellfound’s style, or even develop your personal brand of dry wit, your email open rates will thank you for it.
44. “More related to ‘What happened to wild animals during WW2?’” (Quora)
Quora, a platform about user-submitted questions and answers, tracks their latest user activity and schedules a follow-up email to remind patrons about new developments in their favorite subjects.
It’s a great strategy to make old users return to your site, and it requires minimal effort because Quora is likely using an automated email scheduling system like Buzzstream or Mailshake to send email reminders periodically.
Key takeaway: If you can determine your audience’s recent activity on your site, you can send an email to remind them about their ongoing interest in the last topic. This will make them say: “Oh, yeah. What happened to the thing I was looking at like a week ago? Let me go back and see if there’s any news on it.”
45. “Jeff from Calendly: Calendly Product Update – August 2024” (Calendly)
Thanks to rapid advancements in machine learning, AI, and LLMs, as well as the proliferation of phishing and online scams, email marketing has been in a precarious position these past couple of years. Add to that the stringent EU laws where you must be GDPR-compliant to send promotional emails or run the risk of being fined, things have become increasingly difficult for the average marketer to perform a successful email outreach campaign.
The natural progression of these factors has propped up the sender name’s importance in the overall hierarchy of email marketing. If the sender sounds like someone they can trust, people will be more inclined to open their newly arrived email message. If the sender is a lonesome brand name or a name consisting of random numbers and letters, the chances of users hesitating to open it or ignoring the message will be drastically higher.
Key takeaway: As email marketing evolves, pay attention to emerging trends that may improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. One such trend is including a team member’s name next to the brand name in your inbox, like “Jeff from Calendly” or “Katie from Serpstat.”
46. “⏰ Amazing Amazon-only savings on Pro2 and Pro3 kits.” (Matterport)
Alliteration and homonyms aside, this email subject line tries to differentiate itself from its competitors by featuring a special offer (“Amazon-only”) that customers won’t get anywhere else except in this promotional email. It’s an easy win and something you can come up with in a couple of hours if not minutes of your time.
Key takeaway: Include a special offer in your subject lines to create a sense of scarcity and enthusiasm in shoppers.
47. “🙈 Embarrassing conditions” (Diabetes.co.uk)
As you can tell, Diabetes.co.uk’s emoji game is strong. Besides its see-no-evil monkey emoticon in the email’s subject line, the rest of the mail is brimming to the gills with an assortment of different icons, including a grinning face, a smiling face with sunglasses, and a poop emoji to seal the deal.
Key takeaway: Use emojis in your subject lines to communicate friendliness and openness to collaboration. In doing so, you’ll be guaranteed to have some fun and improve your email response rates.
48. “Shorter emails get more replies” (Hunter.io)
People tend to flock toward content that confirms their pre-set rationale. It makes perfect sense if you think about it: someone who believes in ancient aliens is more likely to open an email about the “Top 10 Reasons Why Ancient Aliens Are Real”, instead of trying to examine such a hypothesis through a critical lens.
Key takeaway: Confirm an anecdotal suspicion in your subject lines to reinforce a prospect’s pre-existing beliefs and make them side with your findings. People who think they think like you will be more likely to open and read your emails.
49. “Must-read! 2024’s most popular content” (Upwork)
Our 3rd entry was based on emotional urgency, but how about taking the concept of an urgent headline and turning the knob up to eleven? By using a phrase such as “must-read!”, you’re essentially creating the equivalent of a figurative ticking time bomb that email recipients must disable, or else!
Key takeaway: Sooner or later, you’ll exhaust your creative resources and encounter a roadblock in developing a catchy email subject line. In times like these, tap into the 4 U’s of writing great headlines, which reminds you to create Useful, Ultra-Specific, Unique, and Urgent headlines and email subject lines.
50. “2024 Recap: A year of transformation” (Airtable)
Speaking of yearly events, it never hurts to show your subscribers everything your brand has managed to accomplish over a year, including how you celebrated your wins, dealt with unforeseen setbacks, and how you plan on growing your business in the future. Putting the year in your subject lines is the simplest way to showcase a yearly summary.
Key takeaway: Send an end-of-year summary email to your subscribers that outlines what you’ve done in the past year, and explains what you plan to do moving forward. Your subject line should focus on your wins, or simply serve as an incentivizing precursor to your main copy.
Search and Display Ad Headlines
The online ad ecosystem consists of two main types of ads: display ads and search ads (there are also other types of ads, but we’ll exclude them for simplicity). You can work with display ads on platforms such as Google AdSense, AdPushup, and Media.net, while the search ads market is largely driven by Google Ads.
In terms of performance, search ads have a higher CTR than your average ad if you can get them right. Display ads have worse CTRs than search ads, but they bring a higher return on investment (ROI) if you show them to the right audience. Also, badly composed ads (display and search ads) perform poorly on both fronts.
At any rate, here’s a list of the 10 best search + display ad headlines in recent memory:
51. “Reliable VoIP Solutions | Coverage in 170+ Countries” (AVOXI)
In the official description back at Google HQ, the search giant suggests a maximum headline length of 25 characters to achieve the ideal user experience (UX) for people who will be shown static search ads. Conversely, the maximum headline length for responsive search ads (ads that change their visual format and dimensions based on the user device) is stated to be 30 characters. Ad descriptions are suggested to contain 90 characters at most.
Key takeaway: Google Ads users should periodically check the maximum allowed search ad headline length to ensure a smooth UX. Otherwise, you risk serving users a truncated headline during their search sessions.
52. “Get Those To-do Tasks Done. – Subscribe To Your Sellers” (Fiverr)
Fiverr is going all out in this ad variant, urging users to subscribe to their sellers by clicking on their search ad. While the wording could’ve been clearer and less confusing, this is as close to a CTA as you’ll get in a featured search ad headline.
Key takeaway: Smuggle your best-performing CTA variant in your search ad headline to increase its urgency and entice users to click.
53. “Exclusive deal: up to 86% off – Enjoy the best VPN deal” (Surfshark)
People respond well to things they tend to encounter more as creatures of habit. Surfshark’s approach to search ads includes repeating the word “deal” until it becomes second nature to their prospects’ vocabulary—and by extension—their purchasing habits as well.
Key takeaway: Use repetition in your headlines (words, phrases) to train users to like your brand.
54. “Booking.com Car Hire – Best Price Guarantee” (Booking.com)
In a select few cases, going with a generic headline is the safest bet—if you can compensate by propping up your search ad in other ways. Booking.com’s strategy centers on spending close to 2M on Google Ads per month, which makes it the top 58 search ad spender in 2024!
Key takeaway: You should strike a delicate balance between writing creative headlines and finding the best ways to use your allotted ad budget. Throwing money at the problem alone won’t solve your marketing woes, but it can free up your time to do something more productive for your business. For example, instead of worrying about the perfect headline, you can build rapport with your current leads and cultivate strong relationships with your existing customer base.
55. “Five-Star Spa | Celebrate Festive Moments” (Four Seasons)
The hospitality and travel category thrives on online ratings, customer reviews, and the star-rating system of its resorts. The more stars you have, the more attractive your property will be. Having a beautiful property allows you to charge a premium for accommodations and enter an elite club of the service industry where your brand name starts carrying a lot of weight.
Given all that, why not put your resort’s star rating in your headlines?
Key takeaway: Independent entities in the United States often implement the star-rating system, so owners frequently use it as a badge of honor. If you’re a restaurateur within a larger hotel, a hotel owner, or a resort manager, you could greatly benefit from including your prescribed star rating in your ad’s headline.
56. CHATGPT MADE ME RICH! (Video Ideas Hub)
Given how they appear, display ads are more visually oriented than search ads—the latter being text or copy-dominant. So, if you can’t make a good visual first impression while your ad is showing, you’ll achieve the same effect as not having the ad up there at all.
Key takeaway: Use unconventional headline formatting (capitalized letters, uneven spaces) to draw more attention to your display ads.
57. “…” (Yves Saint Laurent)
The following ad is essentially without a headline. It’s a video ad, but if it’s not playing, it usually features the first frame of the ad and it’s therefore a display ad during its static phase. Remember that YouTube, where this ad appears, should allow you to upload thumbnails to display to users when your ad is not playing.
Point being, if you can’t come up with a good headline, you can experiment and leave this field empty or simply feature a cryptic logo in the top left-hand corner in one of your ad’s frames like Yves Saint Lauren did.
Key takeaway: If your branding allows experimentation, go radical and exclude your headline from your display ads.
58. “Three Trusted Brands in One Place – so You Never Miss an Update or a Market Movement.” (WSJ)
Historically, proven brands have had a greater advantage in the paid ad marketplace than newer companies. People trust older and established businesses over upcoming disruptors, so, if you’re eligible, why not double down on this factuality in your headlines?
Key takeaway: Capitalizing on your brand reputation is a powerful approach to generating more leads with your display ads. Use your brand’s logo or catchphrase in your headlines to remind users of your authority and trustworthiness, piggybacking off your established brand presence in the market to earn new customers.
59. “Meet the Ridge. A slim, RFID-blocking wallet designed to streamline.” (Ridge)
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a widely adopted technology that allows scanners to read your electronic device without requiring physical contact between the scanner and your device.
RFID can be used with the newest smartphones, credit or debit cards, and other payment systems to make contactless payments. This makes the system vulnerable to a scam called RFID skimming, where a perpetrator can steal your credit card number simply by walking near you with their rogue scanner.
If you have a product that can prevent the worst-case RFID skimming scenario, shoppers might want to hear that from you first-hand.
Key takeaway: Decide on and promote one of your product’s ultra-specific benefits (“RFID-blocking”) that customers can’t encounter anywhere else.
60. “Psychological principles of high-converting sites” (Wix)
Use elements from everything you’ve learned to create your ultimate display ad headline. Moreover, you can always A/B test your headline variants to filter out the winners from the losers in less than a month.
Key takeaway: Use authority phrases such as “psychological principles” to create a sense of anticipation, and then end your headline with a desirable outcome like “high-converting sites” to further the reader’s interest in clicking on your ad.
Classic Direct Response Headlines
Lately, it might seem like sales letters have fallen out of favor. While this might be true in some capacity, the best practices of most contemporary direct response copywriting have directly evolved from the idea of writing a classic sales letter and distributing it to the wider audience.
In other words, both the means of production and the channels of distribution might have changed (direct-mail sales letters vs print advertising vs email newsletters vs landing page sales copies). Still, the basic concepts have remained the same: compelling headlines, evocative copy, and enticing CTAs create the trifecta of print ads and sales letters that are set up for success.
Here are 10 examples of the most potent sales letter + classic ad headlines to better illustrate the point:
61. “I’m impressed — Shell’s Caprinus R Oil 40 keeps my EMD’s in better condition than any other oil I’ve used in 20 years.”
A certain A. E. “Bud” Dacus, then a Chief Engineer at Shell, has inadvertently (or, perhaps, with the help of a fellow copywriter) created one of the best classic ad headlines in recent history.
Why is this headline so powerful? For one, it comes directly from the person responsible for overseeing the company’s entire operation, who also serves a double role as an expert spokesperson providing an honest testimonial in the ad. The cynics of today might disregard this headline as self-promotion, but its effectiveness continues to permeate to the modern age regardless of its retractors’ strongest counter-arguments.
Key takeaway: By combining two headline techniques we discussed earlier (featured experts + client testimonials), you can craft an evergreen headline that will continue generating traction years after its original public debut.
62. “A Little Mistake That Cost A Farmer $3,000 A Year”
This ad ran in many different magazines related to farming and farm life, and it proved to be very powerful due to its reliance on the concept of loss aversion.
Loss aversion is a powerful motivator that beats its counterpart or the prospect of financial gain. Telling people they can become richer isn’t as potent as telling them they’ll lose the money they already have. If you were a farmer back then, you’d be thrilled to learn that you can avoid hemorrhaging $3,000 a year (not adjusted for inflation) by identifying a “little mistake”, as claimed in the ad’s headline.
Key takeaway: Reiterate the concept of loss aversion in your headlines to create irresistible media pieces and get users to convert.
63. “High School Student Loses Almost 600 Pounds And Now Devotes His Life To Helping Others Get Skinny!”
A serious headline discussion wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the late, great Gary Halbert. His mesmerizing writing has captivated millions and generated around $1B in lifetime revenue.
In the following letter/advert hybrid, Gary leads with a shocking statement (“Loses Almost 600 Pounds”) to shake up the dormant reader and transform their habitual drowsiness into genuine interest. The added fact of the titular hero’s occupation (“High School Student”) adds a layer of accessibility that could make people identify with the ad’s original premise and say to themselves: “Yeah, that’s me or that could be me!”
Key takeaway: Inject a shock factor into your headlines to facilitate a gamut of emotions in readers, ranging from anxiety and anger to empathy and surprise. Emotionally-charged prospects are more likely to read your copy.
64. “The story of two clerks in New York City who started together a few years ago, side by side, each earning $12 a week”
This entry is a prime example of the subheadline’s premise overshadowing the main headline in every imaginable aspect. Compared to the primary headline (“Earns $30,000 a Year Because of His Remarkable Memory”), the subheadline is far more intriguing, engaging, and captivating than its main counterpart.
It follows the two-men narrative trope, where two men are raised together or exist in the same environment, and each goes their separate way. When they finally reunite after years of not having contact with each other, one typically emerges as the morally illuminated individual. In contrast, the other man is revealed to be morally, financially, or intellectually inferior to his friend.
You can trace this storytelling trope back to the stories of Cain and Abel, Ramses and Moses, or, as a more recent example, The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain. This trope might have inspired Martin Conroy to write the eponymous Wall Street Journal sales letter that generated the publication of around $2B in sales and subscriptions over 28 years while it was actively doing the rounds.
Key takeaway: Make sure to develop a catchy subheadline to complement your primary headline. Occasionally, the subheadline will eclipse your headline and become the defining factor of your campaign.
65. “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?”
Everyone makes mistakes. Most of today’s world speaks English. Max Sackheim, the ad’s original author, cast the widest net in one of the shortest headlines known to advertisers.
The result?
The advert ran for 40 years, performed extremely well, and inspired hundreds of knockoffs in fields that had nothing to do with language learning and acquisition.
Most experts ascribe the ad’s exceptional success to the inclusion of the determining pronoun “these”. According to them, the word “these” prevented answering the question with a yes/no response, generating interest to keep reading in order to discover the real mistakes.
However, we have a different hypothesis. Max’s headline is compact, simple, and speaks to most of the learned world. It also emerged when people’s attention spans were significantly longer than today’s mainstream audience. Combined, these two facts propelled the headline into marketing stardom, and the rest is history.
Key takeaway: Try to address the largest number of prospects in a compact, easily digestible headline.
66. Magic Baloney: You’ll love the way we hated the Magic Stat thermostat until an amazing thing happened.”
Some things you just love to hate, until you start loving them again. In this ad, Joe Sugarman plays with phrases and semantics like a kid with Lego blocks: he combines two words with opposite meanings (love vs hate) to elicit a sense of rhythm and structure. He then throws a rhyme in there for good measure (“Magic Stat thermostat”) and ends the ad on an amazing note—quite literally.
Key takeaway: Use rhythm, rhyme, and structure to create a naturally flowing headline that’s charming to read. People will recognize your efforts and either play along with your game or sneer at your effort and mentally delist your product or services from their shopping list. Either way, you’ll welcome in the leads and filter out those who never intended to buy from you in the first place.
67. “To men who want to QUIT WORK some day”
Forget the meaning, arrangement, or choice of words for a moment. Our third and final mention of John Caples serves as a reminder to use the visual elements of the medium to emphasize, deemphasize, reinforce, or scale back specific parts of your copy. You can achieve this using colors, different typography, multiple fonts, or all of the above when crafting your perfect headline.
Key takeaway: Use creative typography every now and then (bold, italic, underscore, or all three) to make parts of your headlines stand out whenever your campaign ideas fall in line with your brand’s marketing style.
68. “Darling, I’m having the most extraordinary experience; I’m head over heels in DOVE”
This is simply Ogilvy at his best. If you don’t like this, you don’t like direct response copywriting.
Key takeaway: Use puns to make readers question the double meaning in your cleverly disguised headline. Also because it’s fun.
69. “To Housewives Who Buy Condensed Milk”
The power of this headline lies within its humility, which also extends to the subheadline. Notice how the author of this ad, the late Claude Hopkins, used the word “please” to appeal to the readers’ empathy in order to present his case.
Modern copywriting is rarely humble, so this might as well be your chance to resurrect an old behavioral trait and combine it with the scientific appeal of present-day advertising to get your point across.
Key takeaway: Speaking to your audience is easy. However, addressing your audience with “please” requires humility to pull it off unironically.
70. “Bun Beef Gherkin Lettuce Sauce Bun Beef Cheese Lettuce Sauce Bun”
This visual marvel was created by Leo Burnett London, a continuation of the late Mr. Leo Burnett’s agency and part of his legacy. Can you guess the product that’s being advertised?
Key takeaway: Media theorist Marshall McLuhan believes the medium is the message. Combine visual design with captivating typography to create unique headlines from the future.
Bonus Headline
Occasionally, you’ll run across a headline that is so perplexing, so ridiculous, and so extraordinarily mesmerizing, that you’ll stop whatever you were doing and focus your entire mental strength on figuring out, in the immortal words of Joe Sugarman, whether it’s Magic Baloney. Like this one:
71. “I haven’t had a glass of water in 20 years…”
Apparently, this was a real sales letter that took the form of a direct mail magalog (a 12-page magazine) and was promoted to millions of households in the United States circa the 2000s. Its creator, Dr. William Campbell Douglass, is an elusive figure who has written about a dozen books on alternative medicine and holistic health, some of which include the following hard-hitters:
- “The Health Benefits of Tobacco: The Surprising Therapeutic Benefits from Moderate Smoking”
- “Eat Your Cholesterol – How to Live Off the Fat of the Land & Feel Great”
- “Hydrogen Peroxide – Medical Miracle”
For the initiated in absurdist comedy, the third book may remind you of a certain Eric Andre skit where he introduced H2O2 as the sequel to water. However, Dr. William’s books are dead serious.
This is called opposite marketing. It takes a commonly held public belief and argues from the position of its opposite extreme. It’s very effective in getting people’s attention, but then you have to come up with real scientific proof or risk tarnishing your professional reputation for good.
Key takeaway: Disruptive/opposite marketing is nothing new but can backfire spectacularly if done wrong. Try to test a WTF headline in the wild occasionally to see if your audience is ready to embrace a more radical message from your brand.
