You are an idiot title shocker !!!

I received an e-mail yesterday afternoon and saw the title pop up in the top right corner of my screen in the notifications window and the title read (in bold) :

"You are an idiot"

I was at the time, for obvious reasons, irritated by this. It turned out is was a regular marketing round up from a Linkedin contact and he had used some kind of software package to create a mix of news stories  relevant to his industry and then allowed the software to quote a line from one of these stories as the title of his e-mail. From the content of the e-mail and tone, which had nothing to do with the title of the mail I cannot imagine this was a deliberate attempt to shock a recipient into reading the e-mail but it got me wondering what impact the title of an e-mail or blog post has on the propensity of the prospect to read the marketing missive. Intuitively a good or interesting title should have more impact than a boring bland one obviously - but is it possible to go too far (as I would suggest mine from yesterday did), even if by accident ?

I looked at my recent blog post titles and the numbers of reads each had. I'm somewhat limited in terms of the data supplied by google/blogger but of recent posts, here's the title and the number of individual hits to each specific post :

Man Of Steel Preview and discussion   36 hits

My Talk Health Posts     25 hits

Karate Grading on Saturday     18 hits

Karate Grading on Saturday Part 2     15 hits

Karate update Bonus Post     14 hits

Latest News from ...      12 hits

Update on Sponsors for my podcast

Late Night Marketing      11 hits

Techfill update IOS 7 and OSX Mavericks     11 hits

Not sure if this tells me anything much other than people are (unsurprisingly) more interested in the Man of Steel movie and karate than my thoughts on IOS 7.

My approach on balance is to try and make the titles of the posts as interesting as possible whilst remaining relevant and descriptive of the content where possible. As an aside, please be re-assured that I do not in any way shape or form consider my readers to be 'Idiots'.

Thanks you and good night !