Let me ask everyone a question .  Which emails do you open first when you see the subject headings displayed in your inbox?

I always open those from friends and business acquaintances first and then anything else that catches my eye.

Now, I’m not one to complain, as you know but the sort of emails catching my eye lately are bullsh*t headlines that are written just to FOOL me into opening the email and are not really what they seem.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for encouraging people to open emails by having subject lines saying what’s inside but it’s those that LIE about it just to get your attention.

I don’t know why they do it because, once I’ve decided that I’ve been fooled, I would never buy their product on principal.

‘Congratulations Martyn! - You’ve got another sale!’  states the subject headline ... No I haven’t, they’ve just made it up.  What the headline leads to is simply that I MIGHT get that sort of message should I join their scam.

‘RE:’ is another one I keep getting.  (Similar to FW: to make it look like it was forwarded from a friend) Now, I know damn well that I haven’t spoken to the person sending this email but they start the subject with ‘RE:’ which gives the impression that it is a reply to an earlier email sent to them from me.  I don’t even open those now.

‘Your confirmation is needed for us to send you ...’ is a recent addition to the BS email subject headings.

It’s as though you have given your name and email address to someone and they need you to confirm, like an opt-in to an autoresponder series or something.  Of course, I open them to see what I need to confirm but it’s just another sales email from the company that seem to think it’s OK to send me three emails a day all with the same body text but with different headlines.  Stop it!, it’s flippin’ annoying!

And what about those that use symbols around the text to attract you? ... straight into the bin.

‘I’m retiring and giving up’, comes through occasionally from gurus who you would be glad if they did retire but they always go on to say something like ‘...that is what a friend said to me today’ so they have your attention but go on to tell you something totally different than you were expecting.  That’s in the bin, too.

‘(private)’ is coming into use a lot lately, giving the impression that it is a personal email from a top guy ... it isn’t, it’s more BS.

To avoid getting their emails lost in spam filters certain words have to be ‘interfered’ with in order to get to the recipient.  So the word free becomes f*ree and cash becomes ca*sh and affiliate becomes af*filia*te.  ‘Freegift’ is written as one word to fool the filters, too.

The only problem as far as they’re concerned is that the asterisks and removal of spaces etc. doesn’t fool them anymore and my spam box is full of words that have been filtered with *, +, -.=,)),(( and so it goes on ... even the spam filters know about Internet marketers and their ill-gotten gains.

How about the ‘fill in the blanks’ emails?  Have you got any of those yet?
“Hey, Martyn!, Want to know about the way you can make money by just ______ and all you need to do is _____ then just _____ and you’ll earn tons of cash”.

The way of thinking being that I am so inquisitive about what the blanks should be that I click on the link to see what I’m supposedly missing.

The above emails are fine to bring in some sales but, once overused (and they all are) people lose faith and it becomes harder and much, much more difficult to bring in new sales in the future.

No wonder marketers are having to go over the top in order to attract attention.

Even online video is getting rediculous with some promos going on for 30-40 minutes with no way of pausing, fast-forwarding or stopping the bloody things as they’ve removed the control panel just in case you ever thought of not listening to the whole thing.

I reckon that email will die out as a sales medium ... it’ll be ‘direct to desktop’ communication like eLert Gadget or similar, for sure.

Meanwhile, I Just spotted a special offer on Viagra. I could do with some of that to save me keep falling out of bed when I doze off after my bed time night cap.