In all the excitement over social media the original vehicle for online social interaction, e-mail, tends to get overlooked as a central component of how to connect with people to achieve a specific goal.
For example, a lot of ink has been used to tout the benefits of building a Twitter or Facebook audience but if you’re trying to generate leads, educate prospects, or establish a more in-depth engagement with your market then the new social media tends to support these objectives poorly.
While e-mail lacks the immediacy of Twitter or the broader conversational range of Facebook, is also less formulaic and therefore more flexible, particularly where branding is concerned. But while we have almost two decades of experience with e-mail it seems that marketers still don’t understand the opportunities and limitations of the medium.
A subtle but crucial issue in the use of email and one that marketers often neglect is how long a subject line can and should be. The answer to “can be” is defined in RFC 2822 which states that “There are two limits that this standard places on the number of characters in a [email message] line. Each line of characters MUST be no more than 998 characters, and SHOULD be no more than 78 characters, excluding the CRLF.”
Now the “should be” part: The 78 character limitation has been ignored by many online services who only allow much shorter subject lines. The result of this is that subject text will be truncated to whatever arbitrary maximum length they permit.
For example, AOL has a limit of 60 characters in a subject line and, according to a GraphicMail spokesperson, Yahoo allows just 47 characters while Hotmail caps the maximum subject length to 45 characters (note: I can’t find any verification of this on either service’s site; if you know any details, please let me know).
The problem with this limitation is that subject text truncation can have undesirable consequences. Imagine a message sent to an AOL user with the subject “(Gardening News) Ready for spring? Ten tips for a better fuchsia display” … truncation at 60 characters might not convey the message you intend (I owe GraphicMail for that example).
As if that weren’t bad enough, the e-mail client being used can truncate the subject lines by virtue of changing the window or column size. Obviously, in both the e-mail service and client cases, careful subject line construction can prevent unintentional faux pas’s and mis-messaging.
If you want to test your e-mail subject lines to see if truncation could have undesirable side effects check out GraphicMail’s free spreadsheet that performs a simple analysis on your text.
Finally, if you have any examples of unexpected consequences of e-mail use or content, please let me know.
