Do Your Email Subject Lines Pass the Email Preview Test?

Email headers are the first thing a writer sees ... is your first impression working?

Top Tier Consulting

Jun 13, 2024

Happy Thurday Top Tier Consulting Crew.

We have an exciting top to chat about this week…

But before we dive into this week’s topic, one quick announcement:

The video recording is now available to purchase for last week’s excellent session with lifestyle influencer Veena Crownholm on influencer marketing and how to pair it with your PR efforts

And what a session it was. We teamed up with influencer and brand specialist Veena Crownholm to discusse how to find the perfect influencers to partner with, how to send gifted product samples that could result in FREE social media mentions, and best practices for making the partnership successful for your client’s brand.

If you missed it live, you can buy the recording for $49 (if you’re a Paid TTC Substack Subscriber) or $99 (if you’re a Free TTC Subscriber). Just shoot us an email at info@toptierconsulting.NET to grab your copy and catch up on this important topic that could add more revenue to your business!

Back to this week’s topic:

One of the questions we get commonly asked is “What should I title my email pitch?” We’ve done deep dives into this in past Substacks. If you haven’t yet read this bad boy, we highly recommend:

A Subject Line is Your Pitch's 1st Impression—Here's How to Nail It!

We’ve also talked about how writers handle pitches in their inboxes. Hot tip: Yes, they SEE all your pitches as writers but writers can’t possibly sit down and read them all. So they do a lot of email scanning and delete what they can as soon as the get a grasp on what your pitch is about and if it’s a fit or not. If it’s a fit, writers will read further but if it’s an obvious no, they’ll likely delete it. This is where a good email subject line can come into play because writers DO delete based on subject lines.

PART 2: A Look INSIDE the Process of How Writers Handle an Inbox Full of PR Pitches

Note: Not because they are bad but because they get the sense that an email pitch doesn’t seem to be a fit based on the subject line. Let’s dive more into that:

The right email header can make or break your pitch.

It’s the first part of your pitch a writer sees when sitting down in front of their email to chip away at their inboxes.

Writers get A TON of daily emails — sometimes hundreds a day and during gift guide season it can even be close to 1,000 every day. There is no way they can sit and read every pitch that they receive top to bottom. So a lot of times writers do a first round pass through their inbox by deleting emails based on subject lines that don’t seem like they make sense for their beats.

As a publicist, you put a lot of time and effort into coming up with the perfect pitch for a writer — and your subject line is basically your first impression. This week we’re going to talk about how subject lines LOOK in a writer’s inbox.

A quick recap on things to aim for in a subject line:

Gives a writer a sense of who your brand is, what the product is, or who the expert is
Ties it into something timely (i.e. The Perfect Mother’s Day Gift For… or New Study Shows ABC and Dr. Smith Can Weigh In)
Leads with the most important information (so often we see subject lines that say something like “Summertime is around the corner. Now is the time to…” Now is the time to what? That part gets cut off. So if you rep a really cool tanning lotion, lead with that. “Summertime glow in a bottle…” for instance
Makes sense: “What do a rock, a bear, and a penny have in common” is clever, but who is your client?
Is searchable. Writers file a lot of things away in their inboxes and/or do a lot of inbox searching to locate pitches when it’s time to write a story. So if you’re pitching a Mother’s day gift, make sure the subject says “Mother’s Day” somewhere in there. If it’s a nail polish, say “nail polish” in the subject. If it’s an interview opp with a Black psychologist, say that in the intro. Making things too fancy won’t help them to easily show up when a writer scans their inboxes.

And lastly (and what we ant to focus on today!), an email header for a pitch should make sense in the preview pane.

Whether you check email on your computer, tablet or smartphone, subject lines get truncated — unless they are very short, of course. Thus, you want to make sure that an email header makes sense in the small amount of text that a writer can actually see.

On that note, Nicole went through some of her email pitches from recent weeks and wanted to share a few to show you what they look like in her inbox. Note, these screenshots were taken from her phone. As a rule of thumb, it’s always a good idea to test out how an email header looks on your phone (send it to yourself and preview it) because it has to pass that header test as well. Writers, after all, are checking their emails in line at the grocery store, in waiting rooms, and (gulp as we’re both guilty of this) even at red lights.

Here are some examples of pitches that we received with headers that work in a preview pane

These headlines are easy to read, convey who the client is and why a writer should care about these pitches. There is no mystery going into this email as to what the email may be about.

NOTE: If it doesn’t lure a writer in right away by telling them this is a cool client, it’s timely, and something that aligns with your beat, they aren’t going to be interested. Too clever and too cutesy and too confusing doesn’t work well for email inbox scanning.

These are good examples of pitches a writer would likely open and not delete based on the header:

And here are some examples of pitches with headers that don’t really tell the full picture in an email pane.

These email headers get cut off in the preview pane and don’t make as much sense when a writer is trying to scan their inbox and chip away at 900 daily emails. Thus, these may get deleted in the first pass. When you open these emails, yes, the titles work and make sense, it’s just that in the email preview pane and that small amount of text you can see in your inbox previewing the title, they get cut off.

Hot tip: We had an example in here that said: Introducing: XYZ new client. There isn’t much a writer can do with an email pitch that is just annoucing they rep a new client. If that new client had the perfect solution for sun damage, for instance, and that was in the header, however, that could spark interest.

Other examples below are pitches that get really creative in the header but lose the main messaging in the short email header space the publicist has to work with. These types of pitches may easily not inspire a writer to open them when they have limited time to go through emails.

See how confusing some of these are? What do they even mean? Our best tip when it comes to nailing your subject lines in generally is to look at them critically, from an outsider’s perspective. You may know this brand inside and out, but will a third-party (read: a writer) know what you’re talking about? Also if you have a long subject line, make sure the tiny bit that a writer sees in their email preview box gets exactly what you want to convey across.

Any questions on this topic? Our comment section is open and we ALWAYS reply!