Email marketing - A severe mistake

Fellow Warriors.

Some of the biggest names in the IM industry are making a massive mistake when creating their email campaign and in order to help increase your open rate I am making you aware of it. This isn't the normal shock headline kind of thing to get your attention, but a real issue that people are simply missing.

As an example here is a recent email I received from the Gmail inbox page (prior to opening the email)

Title:
David, You Should Read This Now

Body:
If you're having trouble viewing this email, click here to view it in your browser Hi David

Now obvious title issues aside, the main issue here is the shown body of the text. Let me tell you fellow warriors, you only have 122 characters (including your title) to impress me, why would you waste 91 of them?

Let me tell you this, I have seen so many shock email titles that I am immune to them. Two things matter to me when I'm opening an email; the author and the first line of actual content. If neither of these points impress me, I'm deleting it immedately. If I don't know what your USP is after reading these 122 characters, I'm not interested.

Here is the info you need for the big email providers:

Google
122 characters inclusive of your title in full

Hotmail
Email title in full

Yahoo!
First 35 characters of email title only.

If a good proportion of your subscriber list is with Gmail then you might like to check your auto-responder and if necessary, shorten the title and give your USP in the first line of your body.

This is way I always believe my subscribers to think and I always market to them as I would to myself. I found in testing that the open rate increased significantly.