Christoph Trappe asked:

“I prefer email newsletters with a specific subject line. Not something generic, for example: ‘Today’s email from CT.’ @cspenn, what do you do with your subject lines?”

That’s a great question, and there isn’t a bulletproof answer. Generally speaking, there are two classes of emails, emails you’re not expecting and emails you are expecting. When it comes to outreach, to solicitation, to showing up on someone’s doorstep unexpectedly, you generally want to go for attention-grabbing subject lines, something that will make a person sit up and take notice (or at least not immediately hit delete). You’ve got to grab their attention in the inbox.

However, when it comes to newsletters that someone actually signed up for, I have found in my own personal experience that a consistently formatted From address and repeated subject line delivers consistently good results. Why? It’s brand recognition. When you see “From: Christopher Penn” and a subject line of “Almost Timely News from @cspenn for 4/1/13”, you know without a doubt what the email is and what’s inside of it. When I started to get clever with naming conventions, recognition went down and open rates went down.

Of course, that’s predicated on having a great email newsletter first. If it sucks, then the brand recognition will work against you and people will delete you first, so you’d better have an awesome, amazingly great newsletter to make brand recognition work in your favor.

As always, I remind you to test, test, test. What works for me and my audience is likely not to work for you and your audience.

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