10 Ways Harvard Writes Better Email Subject Lines Than Us

Today Harvard Business Review (publishers of all manner of goodies at hbr.org) emailed me some sales material with the hardest-hitting subject line in the history of sales email subject lines. It was a thing of strangely cohesive abstract beauty, like Frankenstein's monster would be had he been sewn together from various and sundry chunks of Disney Princesses rather than local cadavers.

Here is Harvard Business Review's incredible email subject line:

Get 7 Free Gifts When You Subscribe and Save Up to 80%

That subject line is a rich vein of psychological sales gold. I counted 10 distinct psychological principles utilised in it. Maybe you can spot even more. Here are mine:

1. Get (a verb that triggers the "what's in it for me" mentality from the outset)
   
2. 7 (research shows people click numbered lists, as BuzzFeed will tell you)
   
3. Free (English language's most effective buzz word)
   
4. Gifts (another way of saying and reinforcing free, uses the power of repetition to sell)
   
5. When (not if or should, but when to indicate certitude)
   
6. You (personal pronoun, this is conversational language)
   
7. Subscribe (your call to action power verb)
   
8. and Save (second most effective buzz word)
   
9. Up to 80% (a statistic, triggering a sense of measured credibility)
   
10. (Bonus psychological principle: Jaden Smith Style First Letter Capitalisation Catches The Eye Like A News Headline!)
    

This is email list marketing at it's most thoroughly researched and deviously influential. I am richer for the experience.

If you'd like to learn more about how human psychological principles are veritably milked for their applications in clickbait, here's a clever one from Wired.com:

You’ll Be Outraged at How Easy It Was to Get You to Click on This Headline

Thanks for learning!
Michael