Final Thoughts on Email Marketing
A few years ago Gmail added a feature (almost all other email providers also have this now) that allows you to see the first few words of an email before you open it. The point was to allow you to see if the email was something you cared about and wanted to read. Marketers, as they normally do, figured out how to ruin that too, and so the preheader was born.
The preheader is a short amount of text (~100 characters) that goes above everything in an email so that it can “trick’ email providers into showing the receiver those words so that they will more likely want to open the email.
In the end, this preheader has become such common practice no one remembers that it is just a gimmick to get you to open your email. With all that in mind is it almost expected of you to use the preheader properly.
I have seen many great uses for the preheader, one great one is how the NY Times daily email used to do it. The subject line is the first piece of news and the preheader is item number 2 and it is even linked, so without even scrolling down the first thing you see is a link to item 2 (which they specifically choose to be a multimedia piece of content, like an article with a video. Recently, the NY Times has changed their preheader to be tiny little print, so you don’t even notice it, but it still shows up in the email preview.)
Playing around with your preheader may be a great way to get people to open their email if the subject line didn’t do the trick.
So, how do you use your preheader?
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