Say It In a Subject Line

How can you get your message into the first three to five words?

If the recipient read nothing else, would they get the main message in those first few words?

And how you can grab their attention right away?

These are the questions I’m asking when I’m reviewing materials my Comms team or others have drafted.

Is the main message in the subject line? Or the slide headline? Or the blog post title?

It’s in those first few critical words – or increasingly, images – that your audience will decide if they should engage further or move on to the next message.

Your subject line and preview text may be all your reader ever sees of your email, so make ’em count. Check out some great email subject lines to inspire the ones you write.

And make sure you’ve included keywords, “an informative word used in an information retrieval system to indicate the content.”

Even The New York Times, long known for its lyrical headlines, is now including keywords.

And there’s a bigger goal as well.

“What matters more than a story’s ‘searchable’ factor is how ‘shareable’ it is on social media,” the article by Margaret Sullivan goes on to say, “so headlines need to serve that purpose too.”

And what makes something interesting and shareable and interesting echoes the themes in 4 Questions to Transform Your Elevator Pitch.

So how can you say it in a subject line?