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Four Simple Rules For Writing Subject Lines That Boost Productivity

Everyone has a personal cause or crusade: end world hunger, get red-light runners off the road, or outlaw flip-flops. Our crusade: Stamp out poor e-mail subject lines.

Why have we made subject lines our personal crusade? Because bad subject lines are productivity sinks. How much time do you waste opening e-mails that could have been deleted, filed, or archived if the subject line had done a good job of previewing the content? How much time do you fritter away searching your e-mail archives for specific information hidden behind a vague or misleading subject line like For your review?

Surely, you’d have time to end world hunger if only everyone followed these four simple rules for writing subject lines!

1. Write Specific Subject Lines
A subject line should preview the message, be specific, and give enough information for the recipient to take one of these actions:

Open immediately
Open later
Archive/file
Delete

Here’s a subject line that does the job: Notes on July 24 call re ORS Editorial Style Guide. The subject line tells when (July 24), what (call), and what about (re ORS Editorial Style Guide). Depending on the project time frame, you’d open the e-mail immediately, read it later, or file it in a project file.

But many of the subject lines we receive aren’t as helpful. Here’s a subject line we see often: Yesterday’s phone call.

It might take a while to conjure up which phone call this e-mail refers to. And this subject line is too vague to help us make an action decision. What about yesterday’s phone call? Does the e-mail contain notes, a follow up, a question about the call, or an answer to a question raised during the call?

In fact, the e-mail with the Yesterday’s phone call subject line contained biographical information on the company founder, Tim Parker, that we needed for an “About Us” web page we’re writing. This was a “back burner” project, so it got filed it in the appropriate project file.

2. Write Retrievable Subject Lines
By the time we were ready to work on Tim Parker’s bio —a week later—the project file contained a dozen or so e-mails with subject lines that included:

Today’s meeting
Yesterday’s phone call
For your review
Progress report
Contact information
Got your message

We had no idea which e-mail included the bio. Like smart rats, we clicked and skimmed several e-mails until hitting on the right one. The subject line Bio for Tim Parker would have easily led us to the right message.

3. Change The Subject Line When The Topic Changes
Sometimes an e-mail has a great subject line, but the subject line has nothing to do with the topic of the email. This happens frequently when the sender takes an old e-mail and clicks reply without rewriting the subject line to reflect the current topic of the exchange.

For example, an e-mail with the subject line Request for info on training options was reused by the sender for e-mails about his vacation schedule, a personnel change, and a case study for an entirely different project. Talk about retrieval nightmares!

Not every e-mail exchange warrants rewriting the subject line as the topic changes. If the exchange will end after two or three e-mails over a few hours, don’t change the subject line even if the topic changes. But if the exchange is going to last a few days, go to several recipients, and be archived for later retrieval, change the subject line to reflect the e-mail’s current topic.

4. Rewrite Inadequate Subject Lines Before Replying, Forwarding Or Archiving
The loss of productivity caused by a poor or misleading subject line is magnified by forwarding or replying to an e-mail without rewriting the subject line. Multiply your annoyance and time wasted by the number of people the e-mail is sent to, and/or the number of times the poor subject line is reused. You don’t need higher math skills to see the implications of poor subject lines! So, do your colleagues a favor: take a few seconds to rewrite the subject line so it previews and reflects the e-mail’s content.

You can do yourself a favor, too, by rewriting a poor subject line before you file or archive the e-mail. Think about how much easier it will be to retrieve biographical information when the subject line is Tom Parker’s bio instead of Yesterday’s phone call.

In some instances, you might want to preserve the old subject line by putting it in brackets after the new subject line: Tom Parker’s bio [Yesterday’s phone call], just in case a colleague calls and says, “I sent you that information on July 24th; subject line was Yesterday’s phone call.”

Like any worthy crusade, our effort to stamp out worthless subject lines is ongoing. Today, the inbox. Tomorrow, the world!

(c) E-WRITE, 2004 - 2008.

Marilynne Rudick and Leslie O'Flahavan are partners in E-WRITE, a training and consulting company that specializes in writing for online readers. Rudick and O'Flahavan are authors of Clear, Correct, Concise E-Mail: A Writing Workbook for Customer Service Agents

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