By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

We’re all bombarded by hundreds of emails a day for this or that product, this or that event and we ignore 98% of them.

We focus on the emails that friends and colleagues send us where we can rely on the message to be one that we’re interested in.

Somewhere in the world, however, someone is responsible for writing the subject lines of those 98% of unopened emails. And occasionally, there are some brilliant subject lines that get us to actually open the email up.

Hence, they get to keep their job and we get more spam.

For the copywriter I don’t think that there is cut and dry method on how to make that happen, but when it does it is magic. If you’ve created one of those magic subject lines, don’t let it fail by not delivering in the email.

Once you’ve got a user to click through it is time to deliver! No more calls to action before you’ve clarified the subject and given the user a real reason to continue down the sales funnel. Remember, you can go to third base too quickly!

I would have never written this post if it hadn’t happened to me just today.

The killer subject line, “2009 Just Ended, But Do You Know What Really Happened?” I thought to myself,”What great punchline awaits me.” I thought I would read about something that might even be scientific.

Nope.

A big graphic of a video player. Common internet procedure tells me that if I click this big graphic it will take me out of my email client and to some site that will have the video wrapped in sales material.

I didn’t click it. I haven’t clicked it. I am going to click it now. Wish me luck. If I don’t return, go on without me and finish this post by reading the tags in a whispering voice.

I did it.

The action as expected when clicked . . . I was sent to a landing page with a unique identifier in the URL so they know that I actually moved down the sales funnel. Great.

Not as expected was a landing page with an embedded video and no copy. The subject line has been betrayed twice – and me with it! The video runs on auto-play without any controls to pause or skip to end. Ugh!

Below is what the final result was. A mixed message that tells the user nothing at all about why they are there. Funnel stops here. I won’t take this sales pitch bullet, even for you, loyal Tech Startups reader.

I wanted needed you, Cision, to tell me a story.

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Tags: email marketing , email open rates , email subject lines , killer email subject lines , Landing page , marketing , marketing email , Unique identifier