Email traffic

The life of a PR practitioner often involves communicating with the media via email. It’s well known but astoundingly still often overlooked by many, just how important it is to get your message in the subject line of an email to journalists. Liam Dann for example edits the New Zealand Herald’s business section. He’s normally got around three to five odd pages to fill each day as well as the Friday Business Herald, so it quickly becomes apparent that his week is a constant stream of commissioning, writing and editing all done to fit in with a conveyor belt of various deadlines. At the same time he’s got to keep an eye on his emails, I reckon up to about 3,000 of them each week. Assuming you get roughly 40 emails on your screen that’s 75 pages of them. Groundbreaking research undertaken at my desk found it took about three minutes to quickly flick through a page of emails, opening them up and deciding whether to keep them or not. Liam could spend nearly four hours a week going through his emails and that’s before he has read any through, opened attachments or deigned to reply to any of them. You can see why so many judgements are made on the pitch within the subject line. So next time you insist on a boring corporate or uninteresting subject line – remember, that it may ultimately be passed over or deleted in the blink of an eye.