Posted by Gareth Cutter on 23rd March 2009 to
Best Practice Imagine the situation: first thing on a Monday morning, hundreds of thousands of people are scrolling through their inboxes to see what they might have missed over the weekend. Your email marketing message is in there somewhere, competing for attention. What if your subject line isn’t strong enough to stand out from the crowded inbox?
The preview pane is fast becoming a boon to recipients of email marketing as it allows them to make an instant judgement on the relevancy of their emails: whether to read, save or delete them. It’s also a boon to email marketers as it gives their message another opportunity to catch subscribers’ eyes.
In fact, combining preview panes with subject lines is one of the most effective ways of getting positive responses from subscribers – it poses a double whammy of targeted information. By placing important details in a prominent position (so it shows up in the preview pane) your message more of an opportunity to persuade subscribers into buying.
Generally accepted best practice in this area is to place this information in the top left-hand corner e.g. nature of the email content / offer, the benefits of opening it up, and links to web-versions in case the images are turned off or the mail is being viewed on a Smartphone. This is because our eyes naturally turn to the top left hand corner when we read, whether it’s a page in a book or when scrolling through search engine results: it’s the landing area for curious subscribers’ eyes.
Don’t make the mistake of putting nothing but graphics and logos at the top of the page as these are unlikely to communicate your email’s message as strongly as text (especially if the subscriber has images switched off!) Test your campaigns by sending them out to desktop email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird and see whether the window of opportunity is wide enough for your message to shine through.
