Create Helpful Subject Lines

There are many ways to discourage your readers from paying attention to your emails, but you only get a couple of chances to grab their attention. Don’t waste them. One of the best things you can do to improve the chances of your email being read is to write an interesting and relevant subject line. I’m not talking about resorting to spammer techniques like promising miracle diets or pictures of Anna Kournikova-- which would surely annoy your readers (especially when they find neither) or get your message caught up in a spam filter, where it would most likely be lost for good. All I’m suggesting is that you should use the subject line of your message to accurately summarize your message rather filling it with something meaningless like “Hi” or, worse, leaving it blank.

Instead, think of your subject as the headline you get in order to draw in your readers. It’s the first thing people will see when they get your message, and it may be the only part of your email that they read. On most Blackberrys and other handheld devices it’s all that your recipient can see without opening the message and it’s what they use to decide whether they are even going to read your email. Far too many people fail to take advantage of the power of the helpful subject line and fall back on lazy defaults like “hey” and “good morning” that can easily be mistaken for computer generated junk and are far less interesting than some of the random two word subjects on the junk mail I sort through each morning. One recent spam in my inbox had the subject line “Squeamish Dumbledore.” How could I not read that, even if it wasn’t clearly related to the Viagra pitch in the body of the message?

On the opposite end of the relevance scale, I had a message from my HR department this morning that had “Retirement Plan Investment Changes” as its subject. They couldn’t have done a better job of summarizing what the email was about or in getting the attention of the people who needed to read it. If there’s something that people are sure to pay attention to, it’s changes to their retirement plans. Bravo!