Start Effective Email With Catchy Subject Line
If you are interested in your email being noticed by recipients, you must use a catchy email subject line. Especially when using email to attract the attention of people whom you have never met. Forming a good subject line that catches readers’ attention is simple if you follow the three rules listed in this post.Before we discuss the rules, please understand that they are enhancements to the best practices of effective email communication I covered in my other post. Today, many people do not read beyond the subject line of emails received. This harsh reality makes the subject line of an email the first place to demonstrate effective communication skills. If the subject line is too vague, irrelevant or blank, recipients of such email are likely to ignore or delete it. To learn how to craft catchy email subject lines, look to your favorite newspaper and review marketing emails in your Inbox. Analyze how editors effectively attract reader’s attention with 5-6 words used in a headline. Study how email marketers have adopted these techniques for effective marketing campaigns.
Through research and past experience, I have found the following three best practices for attracting attention to your email with an effective subject line:
- The subject line must advise the recipient why the email matters to them. Make it personal to the reader. Put yourself in the recipient’s place and ask if you would care about reading this email upon noticing its subject line. Summarize in the subject line the benefit to the recipient by opening and responding to the email.
- The subject line has to be relevant to the content of the email. On too many occasions, I have seen my colleagues include others into a long thread that changed topics several times over its life span. If you really need someone’s attention, update the subject line such that it is relevant to that person, and what you are asking them to do is readily apparent.
- The subject line should clearly call out a request for action. If you need the recipient to reply, ask them to “please reply” in the subject line. If you need them to review your email, start with “please review” in the subject line. If you need a reply by a particular date, put the date in the subject line.
In summary, including an effective subject line is the first step in getting replies to your email. Remember, in the spirit of my previous post on learning from success, if you were able to attract the attention of a stranger to your email, pause for a moment to a) acknowledge your success and b) analyze how the achievement was reached. More than likely, duplicating your efforts in effective communications will result in achieving success in future email communications.
Tags: Achieve Success, Best Practices, Effective Communication, Program Manager Skills, Project Manager Skills
One of the best tricks for effective communication using email is to put everything in the subject line so that the reader doesn’t even need to open the email to get the message. To this end, some companies have developed sets of common abbreviations that can be used in the subject line.
Paul, you are making an important point that many people won’t even read beyond subject line. And abbreviations are often used. However I wouldn’t go that far as ignoring the email body completely. After all subject line of more that 60 characters is not helpful. The next level would be a carefully structured first four sentences of the body. See my other post for more details.