Gooruze has seen some terrific articles on writing effective headlines. Michelle Reno's piece just before the holiday offered great headline advice in bullet point form. Easy to read, great advice, who could ask for anything more?

In the bad old days of direct mail, we tried to measure open rate in various ways. We can do that with email, and maybe nothing else has helped legitimate marketers fight the sp@m wars to something of a draw.

But I started to gag on my morning coffee today as I scanned my inbox.

Drop Dead, Bloggers

read the subject line from Chief Marketer.

Holy Cow, someone has gone and ticked them off with something. What's melodrama is brewing in the blogsphere today?

Opening their mail brought me to the first headline. That headline was better defined. "Target To Bloggers: Drop Dead". For those of you who remember the infamous New York headline as the city teetered on the razor's edge of bankruptcy decades ago, then US President Gerald Ford didn't offer a bailout. The headline screamed "Ford To City: Drop Dead". Someone sold a lot of papers that day, eh? The headline today was not only attention grabbing, but a nice bit of homage to one of journalism's most famous headlines.

The link from the inside headline jumped to a well written (if not a little tardy) op-ed piece on Target's reaction to a blogger. You know the story. The piece is pleasant to read, has some good facts and is really more blog than article.

But the subject line on the email is the compelling piece of this article. Unlike a certain golf magazine that used imagery that was in decidedly bad taste (prompting an only-in-America overblown outrage the mainstream has now forgotten because the Giants won the Super Bowl and Britney is in a hospital somewhere), Chief Marketer used a scare headline to grab attention. And it worked. If anyone from that pub is reading this, leave a comment and let us know if your open rate jumped today.

The play was right out of Michelle's article here 6 weeks ago. I opened the mail immediately, skipping two that came in overnight from my partner, because I figured that some blogger had run afoul of the online pub.

Great headlines work. They cause open rates in email and even direct mail to soar. Even marketers who have used them too many times themselves fall prey to attention grabbing headlines.

Don't think so? You just read this article. Ask yourself why.