SENDING SIGNALS!

Friday, April 05, 2013

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.

Sponsored By:
CFI - CrowdFunding Incubator LLC
Global Edge Technologies Group LLC
ICS - International Connection Services

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Thursday, December 20, 2012

7 Steps To Fail At Email.

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Email is still a rather popular means of communication, although it is being replaces for many purposes with text messaging and the growing universe of social media sharing platforms.

Here's a great list (compiled from personal experience) of NOT-TO-DOs in any email, or campaign where email plays a role:

1) Don't send a mass mailing of an email to a whole group of individuals and boldly display all of the names on your distribution list in the cc area, where each person can see your whole darn list, or may even choose to send a personal response to you and inadvertently send the letter to the entire list of recipients [the old "Oops! I just hit 'Reply All' " goof];

2) Don't send out a mass mailing of an email to a group of 'undisclosed recipients' and try to cleverly keep their names hidden from each other by seemingly sending it via cc to yourself. That just looks plain cheap. Use a mail handling program instead, such as MailChimp iMail, Constant Contact or another well-known and reliable service if your going to be sending mass mailings.;

3) Don't keep on recycling the subject lines in a running chain of email communications with someone. Take a moment to show your recipient some respect by changing the subject line to make it relevant to the subject matter of the email's content. Nobody enjoys getting email with "Fw: Re: Re: Re: Company Picnic" in the dead of winter;

4) Don't send an email to anyone without ever using that person's name in the opening line of the email. Personalize it to suit the recipient;

5) If an email has attachments, indicate this fact in the subject line of the email;

6) If your email has attachments, always, always put page numbers on any attached reports or documents, regardless of the length. Every now and again some tree burner will hit the 'Print' button on his or her computer, and walk away for a moment to get a cup of coffee (or if that someone is The Mentalist, it might be tea), only to return and find 30 unnumbered pages lying on the floor. That person then has to play detective and try to put those pages in order. He or she will come to hate you.

7) If your email contains an attached document, be certain that the document has a version number on it and a new date on it, so that it doesn't get confused with an earlier version of a similarly-titled document which he or she already has on file.

What else can I really say? Well -- there is one thing. Don't ever send somebody an email when they are within earshot. That's just rude. Unless, of course you, are carrying on an office affair. ;-) - in which latter case you're probably in for a heap of trouble.

Thank you for reading me, re-tweeting me and completing me.

Douglas E. Castle for The Sending Signals Blog, The Crowd Funding RSS Feeds Blog, The CFI CrowdFunding Incubator Blog and The Internationalist Page Blog