Summary: Yes, I still think email titles are important.
Philip Bump (The Washington Post) has written an article criticising and questioning the existence of email subject lines.
I hold the strong belief that email titles are still relevant in 2014, and will begin to examine the arguments supporting his proposition in the article.
His argument is as follows1:
Well, more fully: Emails don’t need subject lines because:
1) Nearly every way you check your e-mail previews the full content anyway and 1b) Threads them,
2) Perhaps 98 percent of the time, you can guess what the e-mail is about based on the sender,
3) Subject lines are wrong, and
4) The 0.2 seconds you spent on a title are better spent petting your dog.
The issue with such a viewpoint is that it doesn't take into account of people who receive a very high volume of email per time period2.
In response to each point:
- 1) Content 'Previews' and 'Threading: Threading helps, yes, and so does content previews, but this comes at the cost of reduced data density. Data density is highly valuable in situations where the individual receives a high volume of email, as the ability to quickly glance at your overflowing inbox to ascertain actionable tasks, and determine which emails you need to respond to, will increase efficiency .
- 2) Intuition about content based on sender: This really depends. For those who are in contact with large volume of clients, or individual correspondents, may have trouble ascertaining (in advance) what they may be inquiring about.
- 3) Subject Lines usually not being about the subject: This has to do more with the individual, rather than the nature of the object itself.
- 4) ‘You have better things to do than write subject lines in email’: Not necessarily. If the ‘0.2 seconds’ used to write a subject line in an email results in the recipient being able to ascertain (from the title, and not the content preview3), then it is time well spent, as efficiency will increase overall.
1. Line breaks added to improve readability. The words in bold have also been added.↩
2. I highly doubt that, as he is a journalist and a writer.↩
3. Content previews are no longer useful in the 'high density' configuration in email clients such as Gmail and Outlook.↩