Writing Effective Email Subjects
It seems my post on Writing Effective Email is one of the most popular ones I’ve written here at uhri.com. In that post I talked about some techniques for better subject lines, but I’ve recently seen a few additional things that have been very helpful.
At my current client, the project on which I’m working has a new project manager who uses these techniques. The first is the <eom> trick. <eom> stands for “End of Message” and is used when the message is the subject. Busy people can save a bit of time because the <eom> tells them there is nothing in the body of the message. For example, a subject of Build has been deployed - please retest <eom> tells the reader everything without opening the email itself. For me, opening an email is a slow process (*ahem* Groupwise) so I know I don’t need to click the link and can clear it from my notifier instead.
Another beneficial thing the project manager does is append “please respond” to the end of her messages when she actually needs a reply. It almost always leads to my immediate response, so she’s doing the right motivating with it. I’m always able, based on her well crafted subject, to reply in less than two minutes to the topic.
Merlin Mann at 43Folders has more to say on the topic of good email subjects in his Writing Sensible Email Messages post.