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Email preheaders are often overlooked by email marketers. With the massive amount of emails received by professionals today, its essential that you utilize every piece of valuable real estate you can when marketing via email. This is important to get the highest email open rate possible.
Before I get into the meat of this post, here’s a quick rundown of some “real estate” email features that you should make sure you are utilizing:
- The from name
- The from address
- The subject line
- The preheader text
I could add more points to this list, but there is something that these four points have in common, any ideas?…. yep, they are all visible BEFORE your email subscriber has to actually open the email. Thus, these are all areas that should be paid close attention to if you are to maximize your open-rate.
On to Email Preheaders
For those of you who do not know what an email preheader is, I would define a preheader as the first piece of text within the email body. From my research, preheader text shows up under a couple of circumstances, as follows:
- In MS Outlook when the email software notifies you of a new message. The popup in lower right of your screen shows, the sender, email subject AND the preheader text
- When reviewing your email inbox within Gmail or on some cellphones, Google actually displays the preheader text after the subject on the message line whilst in the inbox view.
Since a large percentage of email users utilize one of the above methods for email management, optimizing your preheader certainly should not be overlooked.
Commonly, email send software sets your preheader as something like “Click here to view this email as a webpage” as default. This tells the recipient nothing about the content of the email. Sure, its useful once the email is opened and the subject line will give them a good idea of what the email will be promoting, but wouldn’t it be better to add some relative text into the preheader area? The “Click here to view this email as a webpage” piece can be moved along abit?
Example of Preheader Use
Your email might be promoting a sale that you have at your clothing store. The sale might be 20% off women’s clothes. So your subject line could go something like “20% off women’s clothing at XYZ clothing store – Shop now!”. This might be a good incentive for email opens, but what if you add preheader text to read, “Save today on Shirts, Pants and Jackets by Ralph Lauren”? Do you think the additional promo text would warrant additional click? I think so.
By utilizing the email preheader, you are essentially creating a “Sub-subject line” providing you with a further opportunity to incentify a click and increase your email open rate.
So, do you utilize email preheaders? What are some of your experiences? If you haven’t made use of preheaders before, now is the time to start.
About Sam Beamond