📩Swipe these top 10 email subject lines from the past 30 days

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Monday’s here so we might as well get after it. The alternative is the bread line. 

Today’s Main Thing shows you the top 10 email subject lines I’ve swiped for you in the past 30 days. And the reasons they stood out in my inbox. Swipe and tweak them to bump up your open rates.

Appetizer: Top 25 billboard campaigns of 2025, including an NFL 3D billboard.

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The Main Thing

30 Days of The Best Email Subject Lines

The Top 10 List

Ripped right from my overflowing inbox. Quick breakdowns in parentheses show what made these subject lines so tempting to click on.

#1) 528 Hz: The “Love Frequency” People Use to Relax (Used numbers, a unique phrase I’d not seen before - Love Frequency, and who doesn’t need tips for relaxing?)

#2) America has only one real city (Obvious clickbait and it worked. Irked me to read the “real city” was NYC. Which is about what I expected to happen. I’m a glutton for punishment.)

#3) GPT-5 doesn't dislike you—it just needs a new kind of benchmark (Slick newsjacking for the GPT-5 release that flopped. This email offered a fix for a key problem with the update.)

#4) 1 (Yep. A single character. “1”. It leaves a giant blank space all the way across your screen—on desktop. Makes it stand out. The preview text was a super short question.)

#5) Squeeze the Last Drops of Summer: Ballpark Bound! (A call-to-action in the subject line. Rare. Urgent too. Summer is winding down.)

#6) Let’s add value to each other… what? (“Add value” is a phrase I loathe. I had to see this guy’s take on it.)

#7) The 10-Point: A 450% Rent Hike Hangs Over a Manhattan Building (Serialized and branded “10-point” so I knew the email was from WSJ. And a large number % near the word “Hike” is hard to resist.)

#8) How Old Is Your Body? Stand On One Leg and Find Out (Wisely used a question. But then added an answer. But not the full answer, so you gotta open the email to find out. Second one from Allhealthy.com BTW, so their newsletter writer is onto something.)

#9) 🍄 Axios Finish Line: Shroom boom (Simple. The rarely-used mushroom emoji caught my eye.)

#10) The best longform journalism we consumed this week (Another serialized subject line used every week by Simon Owens. I open it because the sender never disappoints. He could use KAT as the subject line and I’d open. But using “this week” in the weekly repeated subject line still notes the info is fresh.)

Bend, tweak, and rework those subject lines as you see fit. Onward now to Monday Marketing News…

Please share Inbox Hacking with a fellow marketing go-getter or business owner. I appreciate you reading & sharing.

Shane McLendon - Copy Kingpin

"Your customers don't care about you. They don't care about your product or service. They care about themselves, their dreams, their goals." ~Derek Sivers

*One of my recommended newsletters below if you’re hunting more to read.