Title Your Emails!!!! (Please)

Posted in: Email

I’ll admit, it is rather easy to forget the importance of writing good subject lines in your e-mails. How many times have you quickly typed “hi” or “!!!!” (or worse, nothing at all) into the subject line of an e-mail you’ve sent off? My guess is that you’ve probably done this several times in the last few days.

As spam continues to pour into our inboxes, we often distinguish it from our legitimate e-mails by reviewing the subject line. I immediately know that the e-mail marked “Erin: Here are the PDF files for the ABC website” is legit, and I can pick it out from the various “Look now!” and “Obtain degrees from Prestigious non-accredited Universities” spam e-mails.

Last week I was called out when I failed to follow my own advice. I received the following e-mail from one of my contractors:

“Erin, I’m finding it a pain to scan through our e-mail correspondence, mainly due to non-descript e-mail subjects like “question.” Be a star and try and make them more descriptive like “Website XYZ Javascript rework.” Then, I can spot them easier in our rapidly expanding list of e-mails.”

Not only was this e-mail a great reminder, it was a loud wakeup call pointing out that I’d become lazy - and my laziness was negatively affecting others. Don’t become lazy. Title your e-mails; your recipients will thank you for that small extra bit of effort.

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