Why you should be optimizing your email preheaders
As customers receive more and more email notifications these days, it's becoming harder to rise up above the noise and pique the customer's attention. As a marketer, how do you get your email to be noticed in a sea of emails, and better yet, be opened?
One strategy is to optimize the first couple of things that a user sees in your message. I'm not talking about the message body itself, but rather things even before that. Basic things like the from name, the from email address, subject line, and preheader text.
You’re probably thinking, “I know what the email address, email name, and subject line are, but what’s preheader text?” Preheader text is the first few characters of text from an email that a user sees in their email client, immediately following the subject line. The amount of preheader text shown varies from client to client, but it typically ranges from 80-120 characters, or almost the size of a tweet.
The preheader text is often the difference between a conversion and an archived email, so it’s important to be as clear and concise as possible.
You'd be amazed at how many companies actually completely ignore this extremely valuable piece of real estate. Extensive testing is often done on things like the from name and subject lines (we used to do this in my days at Google), but hardly anyone thinks to test something like the preheader text. Treating the preheader text like an extension of the subject line (which it is) is the way to go. This is only going to become more apparent, as mobile email client adoption skyrockets over the next couple of years.
Emails that should be improved
Even the biggest companies are guilty of this. Here are just a few examples of emails that could greatly improve their open rates if they customized their preheader text with something more compelling. The worst kinds of preheader text are the ones that invite the user to view the email in their browser (almost no one does this), or ones that tell the user to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. The best ones tend to include a call-to-action, promote a time-sensitive sale or event, or simply serve as an extension of the subject line.
"To view this email as a web page," or "Email not displaying properly?" are not compelling enough to get me to open the message.
Implementing your custom preheader text
/*--- Preheader declaration in style block in addition to inline for Outlook */
.preheader { display:none !important; visibility:hidden; opacity:0; color:transparent; height:0; width:0; }
<span class="preheader" style="display: none !important; visibility: hidden; opacity: 0; color: transparent; height: 0; width: 0;">This is the preheader text! It shows up in many email clients like Gmail, iOS mail, Mailbox & more.</span>
Sample code courtesy of Github user kbav
Writing good preheader text is an art, but it’s also something that you can experiment with. Try running different variations of preheader texts to see which one gives you the most opens and conversions.
Here at Iterable, we make it super simple to customize and experiment with all aspects of your emails like the preheader text (and much more), so you don't need to worry about implementing the HTML code yourself. We give you all the tools you need to capture a customer’s attention, increase your sales, and get more users.
Be sure to add your email address to the beta list in order to get early access to the product and get future helpful tips.
