Tired of Writing Newsletters That Don’t Get Read?

When titling your e-mail newsletters (or even e-mails or blog entries), you have a short time to convince a reader that your writing has a benefit for them. In today’s High Ranking Advisor newsletter, there is a quick-read guest article titled How to Write Persuasive Subject Lines.

Three seconds and 40 characters. That’s all you usually have to work with when trying to get and hold the attention of someone reading email. And with user behavior changing so much in response to overwhelming amounts of spam, the attention spans of email readers are getting shorter. Needless to say, it’s vital to make the most of your introduction via the email subject line.

The article suggests a few tips for eye-catching e-mail titles:

  1. Make An Offer (ex. Half Off Leather Boots Until March 1st)
  2. State a Benefit (ex. Learn [Whatever] in Only Two Days)
  3. Evoke Curiosity (ex. Are You Still Wearing These Fashion “Don’ts”?)

When looking at these eye-catchers, it is difficult to tell the difference between what might get attention and what one would write-off immediately as spam! For our purposes, we’ve found that titling our newsletter simply as “Needmore August Newsletter” or similar has worked quite well. We believe that readers will read our e-mail newsletters because they trust our name and have come to know us and may be interested in what we’ve been up to. This may very well mark the difference between a mailing that is meant to sell versus one that is meant to generally communicate with a group of known friends and clients.

Kandace Brigleb

Producer, co-founder of Needmore. Currently residing on the left coast.