I nearly forgot to mention this. When I started getting all of those “Buy this from me” emails the other day, one of them that really -and I mean REALLY - annoyed me was one that kinda ‘tricked’ me in to opening it because of the subject.

Now, in the marketing world, getting your emails opened is one of the biggest hurdles to get over and marketers use clever subject lines to get us to open emails.

They probe our curious nature by using ‘teasers’ and such like. Now this is ok, after all, this is marketing and no one is going to open an email with a boring subject line but one of the subject lines that really got to me was one that used a certain pair of letters that made me feel ‘duped’ when I actually opened the email.

Can you guess what those extra two letters were?

“RE”

Yep, that’s it, because the subject line had “RE” at the start of it.

Now, as you and I already know, if an email subject line has the letters “RE” at the start of the subject line it means that the email is a ‘reply’ to an email which we sent that person.

So, was this email a reply to one that I had sent to this marketer?

Yeah right!!! NO - I had not sent this marketer an email for them to reply to.

So, why did this email have the “RE” at the start of the subject line?

Oh, now that’s simple… The marketer had actually typed the “RE” part in manually just to make it look like they were replying to an email I had sent to them.

Tell me, honestly, does that actually sound ethical? I mean, the “RE” part is inserted by your email client to tell you that the email is a reply to an email which you sent to that person.

Now, we cannot even trust the “RE” part of the subject line to actually mean it is a reply to an email we sent. I don’t know how you feel about this but it kinda feels like some gurus are now so desperate to get you to open emails that they are lowering themselves to this kind of underhand trick.

Big question - “Did I open that email”   YES I did.

Bigger question - “Did I read it”   NOPE - as soon as i realized it was just a cheap ploy to get me to open the damn email I unsubscribe from that marketers list and deleted the email. In fact, the more I think about it - I can’t recall ever receiving an email from that person which WASN’T a sales pitch.

But then again, does that really come as any great surprise? - NOPE!!!!

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