Subject lines: political lessons

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on October 02, 2007

As the US Presidential hopefuls rushed to fill their coffers prior to the end of Q3, many a pleading email was sent seeking campaign contributions.

But what fascinated me was the different approaches to subject lines, as reported in articles by Politico.com and the Baltimore Sun.

Since politics is about relationships, it seems much effort went into communicating a personal, warm tone. Like the Clinton campaign's "You, me, a TV, and a bowl of chips" subject line.

But do some emails take this approach too far? It's great to make a personal, human connection, but you have to be careful...

First, spammers have long used personal names and innocuous subjects like "hi" to get you to open your email. So any email sharing similar qualities sets off alarm bells.

Second, the connection has to be realistic. You can't overdo it. A suggestion of intimacy which doesn't really exist will be a put off for some folk. We're back to the email disconnects I talked about before.)

So step forward the "Hey" and "Re: Hey" subject lines reportedly used by the Barack Obama campaign.

I'd love to see the open rates. To me, they're likely to get confused with spam. Michael Leddy agrees.

The Politico.com writer described the use of "Re:" in the subject line as clever "...to make recipients feel like they were already invested in the conversation."

But one man's clever is another man's borderline deception. Warm and friendly or deceptive and invasive?

I'm sure these campaigns have some pretty hot (and expensive) marketers on board. I'd love to hear about the thoughts behind their email approaches...

More on subject lines | Tags: email marketing, subject lines, email copywriting

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1 Comments:

I'm in the 'deceptive and invasive' camp.
By Anonymous, on 02 October, 2007