Email Subject Lines That Hook The Recipient (And Make Your Letter Seem More Important Than Any Others)

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In my personal opinion, speaking just as Douglas E. Castle, for himself -- "Every Email Subject Line Should Be A Hooker." Amen. Please allow me to explain.

An unexciting, irrelevant email subject line, without either a confirmation of an appointment or a call to action will be received with less impact than its exciting, relevant and timely alternative. Make your email subject lines relevant (to the topic of the email correspondence), strong (the first five words are the most important by far -- the same as applies to news headlines, slogans and in blog posting) and with a call to action or a confirmation of some matter between sender and recipient.

By the way, the two things that annoy this author the most regarding email protocol are these and they are incredibly common:

1) An ever-growing list of copied parties to an email correspondence that no longer involves them. Please minimize the number of cc'd parties on any email to the minimal, and even then, only to the parties it applies to. You can bcc all you'd like if you want a party to see the content of the letter without revealing his/her identity and without having them added to a chain of perpetual parties to the correspondence which follows; and

2) Emails between two or among more parties which re-cycle the same subject line for days, months (or even years) after the subject has long become irrelevant. In fact, people mistakenly delete these quite frequently as if they were duplicates.

Following is a copy of an email [edited to avoid disclosing the identity of the offending party] Where my subject line (as the sender) was: "Change Your Email Subject Lines When Writing To Me."
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Bernie:

I will ring you up on Skype at 4:30 pm my local time (Eastern).

In the future, you might consider changing the subject line headings in your email correspondence to avoid confusion. Most people prefer when the subject line is relevant to the new correspondence instead of a sender's perpetual re-cycling of a subject line from some earlier correspondence which is no longer appropriate.

Constant replication of historic subject lines in a series of emails back and forth (despite the change of subject) makes it difficult for the recipient to categorize them for prioritization, filing, and deletion.

Thank you.

Douglas

Douglas E. Castle
Return Email : douglas.castle@yahoo.com
Linked In Profile : http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/douglascastle
Skype : douglascastle [by prior appointment only]
Twitter : http://twitter.com/DouglasECastle1

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Sincerely, friends, followers and colleagues - what else could I say to this offender, who (I might add) has an incredibly high rate of recidivism, either because he is attempting to irk me, or because he is suffering from a deteriorating mental condition. If it's the former, I will continue my barrage of corrective assaults; if the latter, then [Man! Do I feel guilty even thinking this possible!] no amount of corrective emails or blog postings on the subject of communications would ever help.

As always, thank you for reading me (or for having my articles read to you), and for sharing my articles with your friends, associates and colleagues through you social media channels.

Boo-Rah!

Douglas E. Castle

for The Sending Signals Blog, The Taking Command Blog, The Global Futurist Blog and others beyond my ability to count.

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