Posts
Why Do People Unsubscribe From Emails?
Easy Social Media Integration for Email Marketing
Update: Drag and Drop Images
Free Christmas Card Email Templates
Signup Form Enhancements Released
More Than Just A Pretty Face
More Social Sharing For Your Emails
Can You Write a Marketing Email in Less Than 500 Characters?
Social Sharing in Sentori
New Editor and API Beta
Sentori is hiring an ASP.NET developer
Email Marketing Privacy Policy
Top 5 Tips to Grow Your Email Marketing List
Taking advantage of email preheaders
Do not buy or rent email lists
UK Data Protection checklist
Legal requirements for email footers
Email marketing law in the UK
Taking advantage of email preheaders
You should consider making better use of the small but important piece of real estate at the very top of your marketing email that we call the pre-header. A well-executed preheader can increase email open rates, improve delivery and whitelisting, and even help grow your list.
From the design point-of-view, this should be quite discrete and it should not detract from the overall visual impact of the email's design.
How the preheader looks to your recipients
This short piece of text will then feed the message preview that people see when an email arrives. The message preview can take numerous forms, such as a taskbar pop-up in Gmail and Outlook (see screenshot below).
Other examples include the snippet in Gmail's inbox view, which, when turned on, will preview the first 55-60 characters of your email (depending on the recipient's screen resolution). Outlook also has a snippet feature in its inbox.
What to put in your preheader
Don't make the first thing you say in the email "If you are having trouble seeing this email click here". It's much better to put between 15 and 20 words that extend your subject line and explain further the content of your email.
Confirm that you really know the recipient and also how you made contact. Why not merge into your email the final part of the sentence "You are being sent this email because sentBecause". To do this you will need to start recording exactly when and how someone joined your mailing list -- something that Sentori's signup forms can do for you automatically.
There are a number of reasons why it's a good idea to mail merge into your email the contact's own email address - "This email was sent to emailAddress". For example, people often use multiple email addresses with a common inbox -- it's helpful to be clear exactly what address you are emailing. Alongside the recipient's email address it's also a good idea to offer a signup link for recipients who have been forwarded the email by someone on your list.
Note: We've used emailAddress and sentBecause to indicate merged in data from the contact's database record.