@matthew.kravitz, the caveat at the end of your post tells me you already sense where this is going. Let’s tackle your question and then explore deeper.
Quick practical answers:
→ Length: get the main idea into the first 40 or so characters. That's roughly where mobile previews cut, and most reporters triage on their phone.
→ Symbols: "&" and "-" are fine. Spam filtering cares far more about sender reputation, list hygiene, and link behavior than punctuation.
→ Clickbait: no. Reporters are the single most clickbait-resistant audience on earth. Specific beats clever every time.
→ Brevity vs. clarity: for press releases, clarity wins. "Company X names new CFO" outperforms anything intriguing, because the reporter is scanning for relevance, not entertainment.
Here's the important part: Open rate is not an outcome. It's an output. Optimizing an output without knowing which outcome it feeds is how comms teams end up busy and invisible.
So walk it down the line:
→ Subject line improves, then what? Opens improve.
→ Opens improve, then what? Replies. Pickup.
→ Then what? Placements, in the outlets that actually matter to you.
→ Then what? Reach, then relevance, then reputation, then revenue.
Somewhere on that chain you hit a business metric. That's the one to work backwards from. Once you know it, the subject line question mostly answers itself, because you'll know which reporters, which topics, and which framing move the thing you care about.
There's also a free version you can do in 30 seconds. Grab your phone, open your inbox, and look at what you actually opened this week versus what you deleted without thinking. What made the difference? Usually it wasn't word order. It was whether the sender clearly knew who you were and what you cared about. Do unto others.
Which leads to the uncomfortable possibility: the honest answer to your question might be that subject lines are not your problem. If your sends are overwhelmingly press releases going to a broad reporter list, no subject line fixes a relevance mismatch. It just gets you a slightly better open rate on emails that were never going to convert.
On your Meltwater question, whether we already show what's worked in the subject lines you and your colleagues have used: your outreach performance data by pitch is captured. Worth pulling, but read it as a diagnostic rather than a scoreboard. The interesting cut isn't which subject lines opened best, it's which pitches converted to coverage and what those had in common upstream of the subject line.
On time spent: less than you'd think when the pitch is right for the person. More than any amount will save you when it isn't.
If you want a structured read on where your measurement approach sits today, the DDC maturity assessment takes about 8 minutes and gives you a baseline: https://www.linkedin.com/smart-links/AQEs2GYoeMmUHg Curious your thoughts.
