Tip of the Week: Create Useful Email Subjects

If you’ve ever received an email without a subject line, chances are you’ve never felt inclined to open it as soon as possible. The email subject line is critical to capturing the user’s attention; it helps to ensure they understand what they can expect from the email’s contents. Here are a couple of pointers on how you can create more effective email subject lines to increase the chances of them being read.

Email Subjects Benefit the Reader
A key aspect of the fine art of email subjects is that the subject is there to help the reader determine how valuable the message is. This helps them determine whether it’s worth investing time in. While it might seem easy to see a generic subject line and avoid it, it’s even more tempting to bypass one with no subject at all. This is extremely important for messages that go out to a lot of people at a time.

Subject Lines Shouldn’t Be the Entire Message
While the subject line is important, it shouldn’t be the entire message. The subject line is only meant to be a glimpse of what the message is about. Save the entirety of the message for the actual message body. If the message is complicated enough that you need to explain it so thoroughly in the subject line, then perhaps it’s best to have the conversation in person. The best subjects are short enough to be consumed while providing an adequate summary of what the message is about, keeping the majority of the details for the message itself.

Make Sure You Use a Subject
If someone doesn’t include a subject on their message, you can assume one thing: the sender doesn’t find it important enough to assign a subject. This basically means that anyone who has a considerable amount of responsibility might never get around to reading emails without a subject, or at best be pushed to the side rather than thrown to the top of a priority list.

Did you find this tip helpful? Sound off in the comments below for other topics you might want us to include in future tip of the week blogs.