There is sooo much content out there. Everyday I receive a lot of truly valuable information in the form of tweets, emails, blogs and the more traditional media like mail and TV. My problem is that there is simply too much to absorb so I have to make my decisions about what to read based on headlines and subject lines. Of course, I'm not alone. Most of us are filtering our digital inbox in the same exact way.
Enter the poor Digital Marketer. The harder it is to get someone's attention, the more sensational the headline needs to be, right? Wrong. A subject line that over promises – or worse yet, misleads – sours the content of that message and leads your subscriber to be suspicious of any future communications. In fact, this happened to me today:
LinkedIn sent me an email that a new discussion was started in one of my subscribed groups. The title of the blog is "Warning: This blog post will change your life." The group is run by a professional PR company, so I decided to check it out. Now, I didn't expect anything truly life-changing but I was disappointed to find that after clicking on the link, logging into LinkedIn and clicking on the link again, the blog was 50 alternatives to the word "awesome". Cute but also discrediting to the author and the company because now as I filter what I have time to read in my busy day, I've learned that this company likes to exaggerate the importance of their posts. Next time, when in doubt, I'll give it a pass.
The point I'm getting to is simply put. Step back and look at your whole message with your (casually interested) subscriber's eyes. The people you are trying to speak to are busy and have way too many things to read. Tell them EXACTLY what you have to say in the subject of your emails or the headline of your blog. If it's interesting to them they'll click-through, read the content and come back for more, if not, at least the subscriber won't be bothered by that particular message and maybe your next article will suit them better.
P.S. The blogger is right, we do use "awesome" way too much. Stop it.
