With ChatGPT, Claude, & co., creative block is history. Just feed AI your text, and it will spit out dozens of headlines and email subjects in seconds.
Or will it? 🤔
Asking ChatGPT to “generate 20 variations of a headline for this post” is a start, but it won’t get you far.
Here are two prompts that, if I feel stuck, help me come up with specific, relevant, curiosity-sparking headlines and email subjects that actually make people want to click.
Prompt #1:
The prompt assumes you’re trying to generate an email subject. If you’re looking for a blog post headline, just replace “email newsletter” with “blog post.”
Consider this email newsletter that I’d like to share with my audience: [Insert your text here].
Generate 20 subject line variations using the fascinations approach to spark curiosity. Each subject
should:
* Start with a curiosity trigger like “who,” “what,” “why,” “when,” “how,” “one,” or a number
* Be specific enough so readers clearly understand what they’ll get
* Avoid vague phrasing like “How to do X”
* Be written in sentence case
The sentence case instruction is optional. I just Don’t Like It When My Email Subjects Scream at People.
Will you get a winner right away? Unlikely. But you will get:
- Memorable phrasing
- Specific benefits you forgot to include
- An angle you hadn’t considered
And that is often enough to piece together a stellar headline.
Still not quite there yet?
One trick that works well is to add creative constraints. If you force it to follow a specific angle or framing, it will produce more interesting results. Not to mention that constraints make you more creative, too.
Prompt #2:
Generate 5 variations for each of the angles below, based on the email newsletter I shared. That
means a total of 35 variations (7 angles × 5 titles each). Each variation should an email subject.
* How I achieved a major goal
* Super-curiosity
* Do it like this famous person
* Learn something without pain
* The super-valuable resource
* Stop struggling
* What nobody gets (but is super important)
I got the idea for these angles from an article by Henneke Duistermaat called “7 Steal-Worthy Emails to Boost Clicks and Blog Readers.”
Now, there is no way you will walk away empty-handed.
Between these two prompts, you’ll have more than enough ideas, building blocks, and phrasing options to craft a headline or an email subject that’s specific, relevant, and worth clicking.
