Marketing

  • Email marketing: Preheaders (or, what a difference 100 characters can make)

    Tuesday, February 14, 2017 | Dave Kopf

    IT’S A MOBILE WORLD, and your marketing had better respond to it, down to the simplest elements. Case in point: the oft-ignored preheader, a simple tool that can mean the difference between your emails getting read or deleted.

    To demonstrate how prevalent mobile email has become, consider this: 66 percent of all U.S. email traffic is opened and read on smartphones or tablets, according to the “U.S. Consumer Device Preference Report” from MovableInk. The report adds that 49.5 percent of email opens occurred on smartphones and 16.8 on tablets, with the remaining 34 percent occurring on desktops. In terms of operating system, 58 percent of email opens happened on an Apple iOS device and 7 percent happened on Android devices. And every one of those emails can benefit from a preheader.

    What’s a preheader? Well, pick up your smartphone and open your email app. Regardless of your phone’s operating system and the app you’re using, you’ll see essentially the same thing for each email in your inbox: the sender’s name, the message subject, and approximately the first 100 characters of the email message.  However, look closer at those first 100 characters: Some of them look much more like summary text than the first random words of a message. That is preheader copy, and when sending HTML emails, you can modify how that copy reads.

     

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