How many readers get beyond your headline?

In today's time scarce, content rich environment the headline can be crucial for readers deciding whether to go on and read the article, or skip to the next item.

People in all walks of life and professions have a need to keep themselves well informed and for b-2-b communications this will probably include prospective buyers of the company's product or services, specifiers, installers and stockists. The target audience in other words need to be well informed about the benefits of products and will be bombarded by messages from news feeds, email newsletters, advertising and articles. Often the headline is the filter - read or bin the news item?

Until recently PR managers wrote headlines to catch the eye of editors, who in turn wrote something else to attract the attention of their readers. But with the swing to self publication, the press office now needs to write headlines to attract the attention of their own target  audience. And this might be the headline for a news story published on their web site news office, the subject line of an email or a 140 character tweet on Twitter.

The headline will offer the promise of the value for the reader contained in the  content below the headline and rapidly establish relevance, but without giving it all away. It is reckoned only 1 in 5 get past the headline. And a survey of some 2 billion page views revealed 55% of visitors spent less than 15% on a page!

So what works? Numbers and personalization apparently. Headlines such as "10 ways to reduce heating bills" or "Ways you can pay less for heating". There are plenty of variations on the theme. The use of alliteration is memorable for example - "Heating bills: - ten top tips to save money." In fact there are already proven established headlines that can be re-purposed to suit.

Then of course there are the pun headlines beloved of the tabloid press - The Sun in particular.