Tips to improve your email subject lines

Email subject lines = headlines

The subject line is the first thing that editors are going to see in their crammed-full inboxes. This is where you make your first impression.

Your subject line is just as important to your email as a headline is to a newspaper article. If the headline is bad or bland, you're probably not going to take much interest in the article. Why would a journalist treat an email any differently?

An email entitled “press release attached” is probably not going to inspire much enthusiasm. With 300+ emails waiting, there's no time to waste on vague emails. “If it's ambiguous I just delete it. I don't have the time to find out what it is all about,” says Ingrid Shevlin (Sunday Tribune).

The solution is to try to treat all your subject lines like headlines – short, sharp and descriptive. In the words of Stefanie Swanepoel (Wine Tourism News), “Headlines should be newsy.” Jo van Eeden (Beeld) suggests that your subject line needs to answer the question “What is this?” before she will read it.

Toni Singer (Longevity) gives some more practical advice: “Subject lines should be short, practical and informative, for example: Invite – Car launch; New food product – Fruit juice. This can help you to categorise the info in your inbox, making it easy to refer back to it later, especially if you don't have time to deal with it at the present moment.”

Targeted approach

To improve the chances of your email being opened, show that you have targeted the content for the particular journalist, publication or specific section. Go ahead and put the journalist's name in the subject line. Matthew Krouse (Mail & Guardian) says, “My name in the subject line is a sure fire way to get me to open the mail. Eg ‘Matthew Krouse: your invite to the opening of Lion King'”.

Jason Brown (Best Life) has a similar suggestion. What grabs him is “if someone has used the magazine name and particular section header they're pitching for (and then following it up with a well thought-out idea).”

Is it really relevant?

“Sending a health editor a release on the financial statements of a cellphone company makes you hit the delete button faster than you can say 'network busy'. Whether or not an email catches the eye of the recipient has a lot to do with the sender taking the time to assess whether the message is relevant for that publication's target audience.” That's according to Nicole Sparrow (Longevity).

Keep the hype out of the headline

A good headline or subject line gets straight to the point. Adjectives just get in the way, as do exclamation marks, so make sure to leave them out. Brown says that he deletes anything that claims to be the “best, hottest, latest, perfect for my magazine – it usually isn't”. The idea is to remain as objective as possible. Adjectives and puffery attract the wrong kind of attention – that of the recycle bin.

• Bizcommunity.com's tips: Apart from agreeing with all of the above, we make use of mail filter rules for automatically sorting emails into relevant folders. These rules work on keywords such as “media release”, “press release”, “opinion piece”, “invitation”, “invite” and “interview request” in the subject line (and in the body copy of the email), and we urge PROs and contributors to prefix their subject lines with these phrases consistently.