JTLet's Chat About Email Preheaders
Hey, you. Your preheader is too short. Yeah, I said it.
I just posted an article on LinkedIn, making my case for long email preheaders. I'm talking long, like 150 characters or so. It sounds crazy, but hear me out. It's a lot to explain, but please have a look at the article and share it with your copywriters and colleagues.
Let me know what you've already learned about preheaders, or what you think of them. Are they an afterthought or a vital piece of your inbox presentation? A casual glance at my phone's inbox tells me many companies are still writing really short ones, or not writing them at all gasp. I'm sometimes surprised to see companies with brands I really respect sending email with downright terrible preheaders.
If you have a different opinion on the topic, I'd love to hear it. Many of my conclusions are based on experience and purely anecdotal evidence, seeing how preheaders render in various clients. We've tested them a little bit, but everyone seems to think a subject line test is much more exciting so it's hard to convince the marketing teams to buy into it.
I think it's high time we talk about this all-too-often ignored piece of the holy trinity of inbox content.
Thank you, Jeff. I will be sharing this with the rest of my team. Until now, we stick with 55 characters (80 max), and we have not tried writing long preheaders. Will try this in our next email, and probably do an A/B test.
Awesome! I think you can basically just write them the way you're used to and then add another sentence on the end. I'm happy to hear your team actually has a standard in the first place. A/B testing longer ones might not reveal much difference since many people will see the same thing. You may just catch some few that could see a little more.
Please let us know what the team says.
Great article Jeff,
You wrote about the same issue we where facing a little while ago where the pre-header if it's too short sometimes email clients will add urls or random content to fill in the additional space which is no good. We had a solution previously by using non-breaking space to fill in but it no longer works.
Our current solutions is to add the domain and maybe a slogan or useful information to make the pre-header longer.
I wonder what other solutions are out there?
Does anyone have a new technique to avoid email clients from pulling random information this way we can keep the pre-header short?
thanks!
The NBS is a pretty interesting idea. I don't think we ever tried that.
As for filling it out, I default to the type of stuff I mentioned in the article, like "Open this email to read the details" or some such. It's not really a big deal if it gets cut off, but if it does show up it drives action. I'd opt for something like that over a slogan unless you're in heavy brand-building mode and want to increase familiarity with your subscribers. I think it's a great conversation to have with the team at any rate.
There is something else that is interesting to look at. You can add a summary of the email in the hidden preheader copy. Siri will read the first copy it encounters for 25 seconds if you ask Siri to open an email.
http://www.emailaudience.com/this-is-how-you-make-your-emails-apple-siri-proof/