A Subject Line is Your Pitch's 1st Impression—Here's How to Nail It!
A deep dive into the do's and don't of writing a subject line that makes writers want to open YOUR email over the hundreds of others vying for their attention
Hi Top Tier Crew.
Hope your week is going well. Diving in this week with a topic we get asked about A LOT: How should we handle email subject lines?
Should they be clever?
Funny?
Filled with puns?
Direct and to the point?
How short?
How long?
What information should we include in there?
What information should we leave out?
What makes a good one?
What makes a bad one?
What turns a writer off?
But before we dive in, a few housekeeping items you’ll want to know about:
RSVP For Our May Pitch Perfecting Workshop and Watch Your Success Rates Soar!
There is still time to sign up for upcoming group Pitch Perfecting Workshop, which is back by popular demand. As a reminder, you’ll have the opportunity to workshop your pitches with us in this as well as receive all our best tips and tricks on standing out in a writer’s inbox!
Here are the details:
Yes, we offer Pitch Perfecting Workshops as private sessions for agencies or individuals, but now we’re making them more accessible and affordable for freelance publicists and smaller agencies, too!
Here are the deets:
What: Ready to take your pitches to the next level? Or are you wondering why certain pitches aren’t getting much response? Learn how to take your emails from, “Here’s a client I represent,” to “Here’s a story idea you can’t possibly turn down.” Between the two of us, we receive thousands of pitches per week (sometimes one thousand a day alone), so we have many tips — and examples — of what works and what doesn’t. From coming up with the perfect email subject line to improve your open rates to sealing the deal with your closing remarks, your word choices matter throughout the entire pitch. We’ll help you perfect them.
Format: 1.5-hour workshop via Zoom with Jill and Nicole includes:
45-minute formal presentation of our best pitch-perfecting tips
subject line best practices
body of email best practices
tips to help your pitches stand out in busy writers’ inboxes
follow-up best practices (yes, we encourage you to follow up!)
45 minutes of providing feedback
we’ll dissect one pitch per participant, so come prepared with yours and don’t be shy … we haven’t made anyone cry yet, promise!
you’ll walk away with a pitch that’s ready to distribute, advice on how to tailor it to a specific target market, and all our best pitching knowledge in the palm of your hand
Q&A throughout the session
Opportunity to network with and learn from your colleagues
Date: Thursday, May 18 at 12 pm PST/3pm EST
Group size: Capped at 10 participants; first come, first served (prepayment is required to hold your slot)
Pricing: $299 per person for Top Tier Annual Paid Subscribers; $359 per person for Free Subscribers
(Note to free subscribers: The TTC annual subscription fee is $99 — so, upgrading would save you $60 on this workshop, PLUS you’d get access to ALL our paid content and monthly Top Tier Talks for just $39 more for the year.)
Questions? Ready to sign up? Reach out to us at info@toptierconsulting.net today!
Tomorrow is our April Top Tier Talk: Last Chance to RSVP
Here’s everything you need to know about tomorrow’s session, including how to sign up and the worksheet to share your questions:
And if you’ve already signed up and said you’d circle back on your question, now’s the time to do so!
We’ll be sending the Zoom link out tomorrow morning, so stay tuned for that separate email.
Now back to this week’s adventures: The email subject line.
First of all, why is this important to mull over? Well, an email header is truly the very first impression that your pitch makes. As writers, we receive hundreds to thousands of pitches per week and sadly, we don’t have time to thoroughly read through and respond to every single one. Thus, we do a lot of email inbox scanning. If it’s obvious that something isn’t right for us (it’s not a beat that we cover or just not something on our radar at the moment), we’ll delete it — sometimes from giving the pitch a quick scan and sometimes even from just scanning the email subject line.
Side note: For more of a look at how writers handle pitches in their inbox, check out our past Substack newsletters on the topic:
PART 1: A Look INSIDE the Process of How Writers Handle an Inbox Full of PR Pitches
PART 2: A Look INSIDE the Process of How Writers Handle an Inbox Full of PR Pitches
When might we delete an email based entirely on the subject line?
Here’s a good example of this. Nicole used to write a lot about CBD and THC for a publication that covered that. She isn’t focusing on that these days and has had a hard time placing CBD/THC focused content. If she receives a pitch that says “New CBD Supplement” in the subject, she’ll probably delete it. Now this doesn’t mean she won’t ever write about CBD. If there is a super interesting trend happening that’s not widely publicized that she should know about, she’s all ears. But if it’s a straight-up product pitch, she’ll probably pass if that’s super obvious from the headline.
The same applies to event invites: If someone is being invited to an event in NYC and they live in LA and that’s obvious from the subject line, that will probably get the axe too.
There are other situations in which an email might get deleted because of the subject line. Carly Martinetti recently did a great twitter thread asking journalists what the worst subject lines they ever received were.
Ones that came up were:
“Final notice” — kinda threatening, yeah?
“Editorial request” — way too vague
“What are you working on?” — screams “this email will take too much effort to answer.”
“Coverage request” - nope
“Can I pick your brain?” — aka “can you work for me for free?"
“Can I send you?” — too vague
“Are you working on TK?” — probably not
"Where to Play WASPy Sports This Summer" — too WTF does that even mean?
“Bad news” — no thanks
“Anything that has my name misspelled” — This can really rub some people the wrong way.
And most importantly, someone mentioned this, which is beyond true: “ALL the ones that don't match any topic or beat I cover.”
Here are some more things to keep in mind when it comes to email headers:
A good subject line is also important because a writer will use it to search for or file away emails in their inboxes
Again bringing it back to the tons of emails thing. We have so many in our inboxes. If we’re working on a Mother’s Day gift guide, we’ll let the pitches pile up, THEN when it’s time to write the story, we’ll scan through our inboxes for all the Mother’s Day gift guide pitches. So if you can make it clear that you have a Mother’s Day gift idea in the subject line, great!
If we’re looking for an OBGYN to weigh in on some new trend in fertility, tell us that it’s an OBGYN in the subject line and mention the fertility trend. This helps ensure that your pitch doesn’t get lost in the chaos of our inboxes and that we see it and file it away to revert back to it when it’s time to write our story. If you try to say something clever about the fertility trend instead and use that header real estate for that, we probably won’t realize that it’s an OB who is available to chat with us and think it’s a product or something.
It seems simple but you wouldn’t believe the email subject lines we see and how much they can throw off a writer.
When we read a subject line, we go into a pitch with an angle of what we think it’s about in mind. And sometimes (often), those lines don’t add up to what we’re seeing in the body of the email. This creates confusion, we don’t have time to spend 15 min interacting with the email, and then think “this is probably a pass for me” and move on to the next email in our inbox.
So what are the best subject lines? Here are some examples of what writers like and what has caught our attention in the past:
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