The preheader text of any email has a very important function and is considered prime real estate so it should be carefully considered. It can contain anything from utility links to offer text, but for acquisition campaigns it’s like a dangling carrot that appears RIGHT after your subject line. The inbox preview treats preheaders as the first line of text in your email so it should outline your offer and call to action. Keep in mind that the preheader does push your email imagery down and with limited screen displays on hand-held devices, you need to make it count. This post outlines some other points to consider.
Source: Mark Brownlow, Email Marketing Reports
There’s plenty of great info out there on what to put at the very top of your email: the preheader area which typically features one or two lines of text in small font.
So rather than rewrite the wheel, let me invite you to reflect deeper on how you can use that space better.
The very top of an email matters. It matters a lot.
For example, it caps the preview pane that many people use to assess an email’s worth. And it’s displayed in the actual inbox itself by certain email applications, such as Gmail. So it deserves more thought that we typically give it…
Nearly all preheaders you see come nicely centered on the page. Is that because this brings the best results, or is it simply a nod to tradition or a desire for aesthetic symmetry?
I ask because some email software packages (e.g. Thunderbird) and webmail services (e.g. Windows Live Hotmail) allow recipients to use a vertical preview pane. So the preview displays the left hand side of the email and centered text might fall out of view.
Here’s an Amazon email in a horizontal preview pane:
Here’s the same one in a vertical preview pane:
Note how the two preheader messages don’t appear in the second case.
It certainly seems worth testing different preheader alignments and layouts to check on effectiveness.
The vast majority of preheaders contain only one item: instructions on how to access a web version of the email should the message fail to display properly.
This makes intuitive sense, given the trouble we have with blocked images and a lack of standards in how email software and webmail services handle HTML email.
But, again, is it effective?
Or do we have it there because, well, we’ve always had it there?
The “web version” link in my own newsletter’s preheader typically gets less than ten clicks. Not enough to justify dominating the entire preheader space.
Additional options for the preheader are other functional items, including:
There are good arguments for each, but functional or administrative information grows stale with time and is easily glossed over.
So how else might you use the preheader?
As Stefan Pollard writes in a detailed introduction to the topic:
“You can use this valuable real estate to build value, interest and excitement in your message”
A strong option for informational newsletters is a quick headline alerting the reader to the mail’s content. Like marketing agency eROI do (note also how this snippet is left-aligned!):
For more promotional emails, consider a quick summary of the offer and a call to action. Bronto’s DJ Waldow writes on this very subject:
“Click-throughs on the clear call-to-action in the preheader have shot through the roof”
The final mix of information / promotion / functionality you use in your preheader depends on your audience and email model, of course.
A preheader needs to be short and succinct, otherwise it becomes the actual message, not the preheader. So cherry pick the options that make most sense to you and experiment.
The preheader is not the prologue to an 800 page novel. Yet many preheaders read like this:
“If this email does not display properly, then click here to view the web version”
That doesn’t leave much space for anything else. Does it need to be so long? In some cases, where the audience is not particularly web savvy, maybe it does. In others, you can shorten it…
“Email not displaying correctly? Click here“
If your audience is very clued up when it comes to online life, how about just:
“Web version“
The shorter you can keep each preheader element, the more elements you can include. Or the more space you can dedicate to more useful features.
If you have an established preheader format, nothing says you have to keep this constant through time.
For example, some like to top an email with a reminder of why the recipient is on the list:
“You are getting this email because you signed up for it at the ABC website”
How long do you need to keep that message there? After delivering ten weekly issues to an address, could you move that message to the email’s footer and free up the preheader for more impactful messages?
Perhaps the initial emails to a new recipient can contain that lengthy, but clear, “If this email does not display properly, then click here to view the web version” message.
After, say, the fifth email to that address, might we shorten that message to the simple “web version” link, saving space and attention for other purposes?
Advanced email marketing systems change content according to what they know about the recipient. Can we apply the same logic to the preheader?
For example, suppose a reader has one of the common webmail addresses and registered an open on each of the last five emails you sent them. We can assume they have unblocked images for your mails and likely see your message pretty much as you intended.
Might the system tag such individuals and suppress the “if you can’t read this email…” message, releasing the space for something else?
If recipients don’t register an open, might you then insert a “whitelist our address” message in the next email, since appearing in a recipient’s address book commonly means images are then displayed automatically in your emails?
And can you serve a different “whitelist” message depending on the domain of the recipient? So @gmail.com addresses get whitelisting instructions specific to the Gmail webmail interface?
If you accept the value of the preheader, why limit this to your standard marketing emails? Why not use preheaders in transactional emails, too?
OK, let’s stop there. I have no evidence to hand that any of the above is yet an established best practice. But all are thoughts worth exploring as you work to optimize that critical piece of email real estate.
Image credit: jscreationzs
You might also like this post: http://blog.mailchimp.com/time-to-reconsider-preheaders/
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