The Whitelist

Email Preview Panes Mean Less Must be More

These days, the majority of email users (around 70%) view their email messages via preview panes, making it even more critical that your email subject lines and first couple lines of body text make a statement. Preview panes make checking email more efficient for users, ensuring they can get a snapshot of each message immediately, without having to open each message first. More and more, users are feeling inundated with emails overwhelming their inboxes, so they are more likely to scan each new group of incoming emails at once, and batch delete without opening. So as an email marketer, this means meeting an additional challenge in order to get your emails opened to achieve maximum ROI from your email marketing campaign. It’s essential that your email messages get straight to the point AND create intrigue and interest, which will lead to higher email open and click-through rates!

How, you ask, can I make my emails pop, to ensure maximum email deliverability?

1) Compelling subject lines: Short and snappy subject lines stand out and are easily readable in preview panes. Well-written and relevant subject lines also illustrate the main point of your email message. For even more on headline words that ensure an opened email, see our blog post on subject lines.

2) Keep the content simple: Because people spend, on average, less than 10 seconds scanning their email inbox before batch-deleting those emails that don’t appeal, simplicity (along with compelling) must reign. Shorter headlines can be strong, and the body of the email can contain white space. Scanning emails is a lot of text to process, so helping yours stand out from the crowd with a few well-designed but bold elements will definitely ensure your email “pops” out from the text-heavy rest.  And that means more email opens and increased email deliverability.

3) Clean, uncluttered email: People approach their email with a short attention span. Where people used to read email, now they are scanning, skimming and deleting. Users are becoming more discriminating about whether to open and act on their email messages or just delete after scanning the preview pane. So be sure to be clean in design and to-the-point in your content. Write to the preview pane, and think about what your users will be able to learn from the first three lines they’ll see. For more on clean and simple design, see our recent blog post on how typography can help your email marketing campaign.

Image blocking within the Preview Pane can be so frustrating, it should probably be called the Preview Pain.  But that pain reminds us that that there’s something important going on up there.

That Pane/Pain is a precious piece of on-screen real estate that needs a lot of attention paid to it.  After all, after the From address and the subject line, the Preview Pane is the third most important element you have to get people to open your emails.

And if your emails don’t get opened, you won’t have any conversions, so what’s the point of having a great deliverability rate if your emails don’t make money? 

The Preview Pane is limited in size, it might be horizontal or vertical, it appears differently in different email clients, it might or might not allow images…and you have to pay attention to it. Period.

For more on this topic, download our latest whitepaper on driving ROI after you get into the inbox.

…Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports gives us email marketing people a great article warning of the pitfalls of ‘alt’ tags.  As he points out, different email clients handle blocked images different ways.  For one thing, it’s not just about the alt text, although many email marketers focus on that. You have to be careful about attributes too. That means beyond alternative words to display when images are blocked, you must set attributes like height and width too.

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Email marketing has many moving parts to it…often more than those in charge of email marketing are even aware.

It is a truism that for many companies, the email marketing department is either under-staffed or under-trained. Email marketing therefore tends to be a job that people fall into rather than train for and seek out.

But part of our task as an email marketing service provider is to educate. Hence this blog, and our newly launched email newsletter. And our recent whitepaper.  After the jump, an excerpt from the whitepaper on avoiding tags that invite disaster…

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Savvy email marketers know there’s a wealth of information to be gleaned from their email service provider’s (ESP’s) reporting tools. But despite the depth of that data, you’re not learning anything new. If your open rate is 32%, for example, then that’s your open rate. It might be higher or lower than your last campaign, but you won’t know why.

Unless you test.

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Below is a quick overview of some of the many pieces each of your email marketing messages should include, or not, to up your email marketing ROI. We’ve drawn this list from our newest ClickMail Marketing whitepaper: You’ve made it to the inbox. Now what? Definitely download the email marketing whitepaper to get more details about each of these components. But for now, here’s a high-level list to get you thinking-and checking. Because email marketing and design are much more complicated than some marketers realize! And checklists can help make our jobs just a little bit easier…

To get your email opened, include:

• A From address that is recognizable to the recipient
• A clear, compelling subject line
• As much personalization as is appropriate and possible
• A quick, to-the-point hook

To get your email acted upon, include:

• A professionally crafted description of your offer/message right at the beginning
• A reason to act right away
• A simple and easy way to respond
• 3 to 5 instances of your call-to-action

To follow best practices and please your recipients, include:

• A “view as web page” link
• A straight-forward unsubscribe to opt-out
• A link to a profile center or preferences page

To organically grow your in-house email marketing list, include:

• A FTF/FTC (forward to a friend, forward to a colleague) link

To increase your email marketing ROI even more, do not include:

• Competing links in a campaign email; include only one action

Like I said, this is just a summary, but can at least get you started double-checking your email marketing and design. For more details about these email marketing components, and many others that will help you maximize your email marketing ROI, download the email marketing whitepaper at http://www.clickmailmarketing.com/resources/whitepapers.html.