Any effective PR professional puts a great deal of thought into crafting the body of a pitch e-mail, making sure it’s informative, accurate and organized in a way that will grab the attention of the media and be as likely as possible to lead to coverage for clients. What many people don’t consider as carefully, though, is the e-mail subject line. This brief line of text introducing an e-mail might seem insignificant at first, but in reality it can be just as important – if not more important – than what’s inside.

The subject line is the first thing a contact sees in an e-mail pitch, making it an extremely powerful tool. It can cause a someone to form an instant opinion about you and your message before even clicking “open,” and can even prove the deciding factor in whether they’ll read the e-mail at all.

Here are some tips for creating subject lines that will help make sure your e-mail pitch is actually read and doesn’t wind up overlooked or sent directly to the trash folder.

Make sure it doesn’t read like spam – Nobody can avoid spam messages these days. When