Why I ignore your emails

This article first appeared July 27, 2011.

Everyday I receive around 100 emails to my newsletter mailbox. I sign up for anything that takes my fancy, but mostly around technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, but occasionally around personal interests such as kayaking and food. At the end of the workday, I browse the newsletter mailbox fairly quickly, to see if anything that has come in interests me.

Because there are a lot of emails, with a lot of overlap in content, I only read the subject line, before moving on. So which of these emails do you think I read? “Sourcebottle Alert 25 July 2011”, “ScienceAlert – Latest Stories” or “Turbo-charge your team’s performance, Another clean tech collapse, HIA warns on contractor crackdown, Aconex and Baillieu family in court fight”.

Obvious isn’t it. (Note that the third one is from our very own SmartCompany!)

So here are some tips…

1. You don’t need to have the sender name in the subject line as almost everyone configures their email client to show who the email is from.
2. You don’t need to have the date in the subject line, because almost everyone configures their email client to show the date of the email.
3. You don’t need to have volume, issue number, etc in the subject line, because the only person that cares is you, and you’re not the audience.
4. You need to have a catchy headline about why I should read the content as my attention span is short and you have lot of competition.

So really, don’t put a heap of effort into constructing your content if you are going to bugger up the execution. You’re wasting lots of your time, but almost none of mine.

Brendan Lewis is a serial technology entrepreneur having founded: Ideas Lighting, Carradale Media, Edion, Verve IT, The Churchill Club and Flinders Pacific. He has set up businesses for others in Romania, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Vietnam and is the sole Australian representative of the City of London for Foreign Direct Investment. Qualified in IT and Accounting, he has also spent time running an Advertising agency and as a Cavalry Officer with the Australian Army Reserve.