‘Doomed’ may sound a little overdramatic, but in the first post on this blog I raised the spectre of how long it would take for doom-laden rhetoric, being used by the media to describe the current economic situation, to find itself into everyday scenarios and then into web and email copywriting. If the headline seems a little overdramatic, well, I’m trying to make a point here.

Below is a visual from my email inbox. Like many people, I prioritise what emails I open and deal with, marking less important emails as unread, to be dealt with later. When I went back to deal with a bunch of these, I came across the visual juxtaposition shown here.

It makes my point well. Retail pharma group, Boots, is using ‘the clock is ticking’ reference in the Subject line to get me to use a time-limited offer relating to their photo printing service. Hemscott, a financial information company, is talking about how to make money in the current market conditions.

The end result is rather than thinking happy snaps when I view the Boots offer, I’m reminded of a ticking bomb, thanks to Hemscott. The Boots email Subject line just makes me feel that any investment at this stage is liable to blow up in my face. They both lose.

The way we read online means we are more likely to make these subliminal connections. The way we interact with online content is a constant facination for the CDA Content Lab and an area where we are currently carrying out some interesting tests, which we hope to share with you shortly.

In the meantime, beware Armageddon language.

So, what is the ‘best’ length for the Subject line in an email? Perceived wisdom is that 50 characters is the outer limit, with best practice limiting you to 45. There have been some bulletin board exchanges about 200-plus character length Subject lines (including one test involving a 1500 character line). But an email Subject line is a bit like a Porsche Cayman: the fact that you can accelerate from 0 to 62 miles an hour in 6.1 seconds doesn’t mean you should.

In the summer of this year, digital marketing agency Alchemy Worx carried out some interesting research that indicated Subject lines of less than 60 characters were best for optimising open rates, while click
and click-to-open rates were optimised by subject lines of over 70 characters. There was a ‘dead zone’ between 60 and 70 characters that didn’t optimise anything.

What interests us here at the CDA Content Lab is how people are engaging with Subject lines? We know that, online, people tend to scan and skim text in a very visual way. This is different to the character and shape decoding that goes on when we settle to read (which we may do online at certain arrival points, but more on that another time).

We also know that From lines are very important when it comes to opening emails, as people try to tackle ever more full inboxes. From lines are more manageable and often more unequivocal than Subject lines. We see a name we recognise, so we open the email. We always advise clients to spent as much time on the From line as on the Subject line. From the Acme Trading sales team may be much more openable that From Fred Bloggs@acmetrading.com if I’ve heard of Acme Trading but I don’t know Fred Blogs from Adam.

So some degree of familiarity – resonance – works in the From line. Can we work this little benefit into the Subject line? What do recipients want to see in their From lines? Keep in mind we’re discussing a business-to-business and business-to-customer / prospect environment here. From lines to mates and relatives are a whole other ball of wax.

What we’re working towards is reply-focussed communication (see our earlier post). In email and website content we’re often engaged in conversations with people we have never met and who we can’t hear. We have to anticipate what they want and reply accordingly. So…

If I get an email, which is not a regular newsletter I’ve subscribed to, I want to know ‘why?’. Keep in mind that spammers are exploiting the ‘why?’ card, so go for something that’s clear and quick to understand, coupled with a good From line that underpins your authenticity. Clients occasionally talk about the ‘wow’ factor but my advice is that ‘wow’ is often very spammy.

When an email newsletter hits my inbox I want so see news. I’m not reading at this stage, so it is possible to get away with words like ‘latest’ and ‘update’ so long as there’s a robust context. ‘Latest news’ just doesn’t cut it without explaining what the latest news pertains to.

If it’s an email from a product provider, then an offer always goes down well – again, give me context.

I’d also hypothesise that, because the recipient isn’t reading that this stage, you can get away with something less than correct sentence construction. Even a simple sentence is a complex beast and I’m not going to get sidetracked by explaining subjects and predicates and goodness knows what else at this stage.

An email Subject line needs a whole new rule book. The ‘object’ of the Subject line is the recipient of the email. Oh goodness, all the grammarians have just fallen over!

You don’t have to place the object in the Subject line. That said, adding the recipient’s first name to a Subject is an increasingly deployed bit of conditional content.

Think about shape. As I’m scanning and skimming, give me short, familiar words that convey clear meaning. It’s worth drawing up lists of words you use frequently in your emails. Type them down, all in the same font, all lower case and the same size and then scan them with your eyes half closed. Which ones leap out at you?

Finally, think about length. If you want to, divide the Subject line into pre-35 and post-35. Put the main point of your email in the first 35 characters and use some additional length to develop a supporting argument or an action eg ‘read our 10 top tips about this’.

And remember, size isn’t everything.

The trouble when you pose a question in your blog is that you’re really honour-bound to answer it as well. You may, occasionally, ponder something that has the world beating a path to your Comments box. But, by and large, people seem to kick back and say: ‘Good question… what’s the answer?’

In my last Post I started out by asking: when do you send a ‘thank you’ email? But it didn’t take much pondering around the subject of writing business emails to decide the real question was: do we say ‘thank you’ online as a convenient piece of default niceness?

When we really want to say: ‘The bank has just bounced your debit card payment!’ does it seem friendlier to start off by saying: ‘Thank you for placing an order with Acme Blogs’? Does the person whose card payment has just been bounced appreciate the subtle run-up to the real purpose of the email?

If you go to a real shop and make a purchase and your card payment is then rejected, the shop assistant is unlikely to start the resulting conversation by thanking you for your order. Being honest about what’s happened doesn’t have to involve announcing it to every customer in the place. You can just get to the point – politely and discreetly.

Email is a very personal communication – even when it’s a business email. We could be buying from the most popular shop online, with billions of customers transacting simultaneously, but the fact that we’ve just tried to place an order with a maxed out card is only evidenced to us and the company concerned. Your email inbox takes on the sanctiity of a confessional. When sending emails we need to take account of that.

Plus, business email is so quick. It’s always possible that we paid with the wrong card, or a cloned copy is currently being used by a bunch of fraudsters in Marra Worra Worra. (Can I apologise to everybody in Marra Worra Worra now. I have no idea if card fraud is an issue in Western Australia. It’s just the most exotic place I can spell.) Back to the point. If there’s a problem with my card, I want to know quickly.

Say a default ‘thank you’ at the beginning of my email and I might just assume payment has gone through without a hitch. What does the Subject line say? If that’s also taking an overly polite approach, I might not get to the real issue – particularly if I’m viewing the response in my email client’s preview pane. People read at speed online. Be less than clear and the primary usefulness of your email may be lost.

1. So, don’t say ‘thank you’ in a business email, when you really should be saying something else that’s more important.
2. Don’t use the opening paragraph of your email like a communications runway, assuming that’s what it takes to get really useful information – payment problems, delivery dates etc – off the ground.
3. Before sending emails, make sure their Subject lines get to the point.
4. You should be conversational even when you’re not saying ‘thank you’ in an email.
5. Review all automated email sequences against points 1. through 4.

Now all I have to do is take my own advice.

Okay, when do you send a ‘thank you’ email?

If a customer purchases online, a ‘thank you’ tends to be part of the email confirmation process. Often, we use the thank you text as the opening paragraph or sentence, that sits above colder but nonetheless essential content – such as describing when and how an item will be delivered.

So maybe the real question is: do we say ‘thank you’ when we should really be saying something else better?

Watch this space.

Back in the days when communication relied on a cleft stick, paper was the perfect format.  It beat cave paintings and even clay tablets in the portability stakes. It was – depending on the servant holding the stick – reasonably fast. Eventually a whole system was built around moving paper about. The fax machine may have introduced a non-paper stage but it was, to all intents and purposes, PIPO – paper in, paper out.

We built our skill with written language around this wonderful medium. We bound it into books. Men in brown robes and tonsures used exquisite caligraphy to create copies of the bible. We developed machines that could print onto paper. There were both desk top versions (typewriters) and mainframes – giant printing presses turning out books, magazines, academic journals, newspapers and catalogues for swimwear.

We came up with protocols for laying out words; upper and lower case, underlining and indenting. Red ink, black ink and green ink. Purple prose. Colour and position had specfic meanings. Overturning or advancing a protocol took time. Be too forward in the layout of your business letter and people might asume you didn’t know how to lay one out (or you were too unsuccessful to afford a decent secretary).

But computers and the internet have changed all this. The range of fonts and colours at our disposal are infinite. Images can be added with ease. With so much choice, it’s harder to proscribe and restrict. We can place text vertically, or upside down if we’re so moved. And if we come up with some particularly clever idea it can be copied by others in a nanosecond. Nobody’s right. Nobody’s wrong.

But while we’re all having great fun exploring the visual nature of the medium we can still end up turning out the same old paper phrases, first used back in the days when upright typewriters thumped and rattled. In large and small organisations, tensions can develop between operational areas (meaning) and marketing departments (messaging) when it comes to how products or services are described online.

So here’s my SMART benchmarking tool, designed to quick-test your content for paper phrases:

Source What was the source documentation for the web content? Was it brochure, a press release, a product blue print… Where the source material came from will influence the language that finds its way online. The more internal the document the more likely it is to contain paper phrases and inhouse language.

Method How was the source material turned into web content? Simply subbing source material to make it shorter won’t turn it into good web copy. Ideally you want to review the source material, put it away and then write from memory, only returning to the source to check facts. The more complicated the material, the more important it is to atomise and reconstite the content, rather than simply edit. Subbing often leaves in paper phrases.

Approval Who gets to sign off on the content and why? The best approval processes incorporate compliance and legal perspectives early on, rather than as a final stage, when formal langauge may be reintroduced and everybody’s too tired to argue. Some of the worst give the final say to senior management.

Review When the copy has been signed off and published online it should always go through a final discreet review about a week or so after publication. Once the pressure is off and the deadline has been met, it’s suprising how easy it is to refine and improve what you already have. And if you’re more relaxed, so is your language. Small changes should not require a further approval process.

Test You may be convinced you’ve written spot-on, online copy but the only person who can really tell you that is your site users. Check site metrics looking for pages that people are leaving to soon (boring) or spending too long on (complicated). Make changes and check again. Then make changes and check again.