Spam subject lines can help you to create a powerful headline
If you’re like most, your spam filters don’t catch EVERY bit of spam and as a result, a hundred or two (a day) may land in your inbox. If you ever bother to take a look at your spam messages, you’ll see that they have some very creative AND tightly targeted headlines in order to get you to read their spammy messages.
For example, I recently got a PDF attachment in an email with the subject line: Tax Statement. This arrived…. SURPRISE, right around October 15th…. one of the dates the self employed must pay their estimated quarterly taxes. Now, if you’re a W-2 wage slave, (as opposed to being an indentured servant a.k.a. self employed) the timing and header of that email might not grab your attention as it did mine. Fortunately, my CPA’s domain name address does NOT include the word "booty" in it, so I wasn’t even TEMPTED to open the PDF enclosure.
But it did get me thinking about headlines and how some spammers are VERY gifted at creating tightly targeted ones. In the example above, they even DELIVERED the message at the "right" time to get the maximum number of rubes opening it. Meanwhile, other spam headlines which speak of their product’s ability to increase the size of my male genitalia don’t get even a nano-second of my attention.
The subject line of an email is just a headline by another name. Some entice with "work from home"…. some use "tax statement" while others promise an enhancement of physical attributes or adult activities. The next time you’re cleaning out your spam messages… make a mental note to see which subject lines catch YOUR attention. Remember, whether it’s the subject line of an email or the title to a blog post, they key is to catch the attention of your target market so they’ll stop and read more.
Comments
One Response to “Spam subject lines can help you to create a powerful headline”
Leave a Reply
Yes it is a good thing to use obviously “annoying” things like spam to get inspired to do positive things out of it. There is certainly marketing lessons to be learned from spam headlines on emails.
To be honest, I do not receive any more spam anymore since I discovered something that I did not believe in the first place would actually work.
http://www.semmy.name/index.php/88/email-peace/
http://www.semmy.name/index.php/92/how-do-the-spammers-get-hold-of-your-email-address/