When you read the newspaper or a magazine, don't you scan the headlines to see what might be worth your time? And don't you skip articles that are clearly of no interest to you? Headlines are tools that help us pick and choose how we'll spend our time.
That means your headline has to reach out and grab your prospects - or they will choose not to give you their time.
And yet, letters without headlines show up in my mailbox with regularity. I'll bet they show up in yours too. Have you ever actually read one of them? I have, or at least I've tried, because sometimes I get a silly notion that I should contact these folks and offer to help. But I always reconsider.
I read a few lines and decide that I don't have the energy to even read on and figure out what they're selling. That's because their second mistake is dense copy - there are usually about 4 pages of single-spaced text stuffed into paragraphs about 30 or 40 lines long. Ugh. But that's for another discussion.
These marketers just might have something useful to offer - but I'll never know and I'll bet you won't either, because they refused to give me a clue and then made it hard to wade through their words.