We spend loads of time talking about coding and sending email campaigns, so today lets look at how to build your lists effectively. Conveniently, our friends at MarketingSherpa did some research into the top 3 tactics you can use to build your campaigns, so I thought we'd cover these, as well as a couple of other ideas for growing your newsletter's audience.

First up, lets look at what they uncovered to be the most effective list growth tactics:

Source: 'MarketingSherpa 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report', MarketingSherpa

How many of these have you ticked off already? If you've vowed to get more people signing up to your lists this year, read on for practical advice on how to make it happen.

Tactic #1: Catch new subscribers at checkout

If you're selling a product or service on your site, providing the option to join your email list during the purchase stage may seem like a bit of a no brainer, but it's often overlooked. Web apps like Lemonstand and Digital Delivery App make it super-easy to prompt paying customers into signing up, as do these e-Commerce integrations for WordPress, Shopify and more.

Considering that "90% of email marketers say adding an opt-in request to the purchase process is at least “somewhat effective” at growing email lists", shouldn't it be a tactic to make sure you have place in 2012?

Tactic #2: Offer valuable content, get email signups in return

If you send or receive business-to-business (B2B) campaigns, you're probably aware of the power of the webinar when it comes to educating customers and making contacts. MarketingSherpa's research backs this up, with 90% of email marketers saying they are at least “somewhat effective” at building lists and 41% saying they are “very effective”. For the rest of us, offering great online content can substantially lift email subscribe rates. In one A/B test, it was shown that featuring a video demo on a contact page could result in 80% more responses!

Keeping in mind that not everyone is a webinar or YouTube star waiting to happen, there's always the option of having your customers sign up for exclusive content, or a sneak-peek of an upcoming product.

Tactic #3: Slap a subscribe form on your site

Thankfully, one of the most obvious and easy-to-implement tactics is also one of the most effective. It's no surprise that "75% of email marketers" use a subscribe form on their, or their clients' site to collect new subscribers. They don't have to be as subtle as the customary 'subscribe to our newsletter' in the corner of a page, as this round-up of inspiring subscribe forms illustrates.

To get started with adding a subscribe form to your site, grab our ready-to-use code in your Campaign Monitor account, or check out our collection of subscribe form plugins. We've even got a neat little AJAX subscribe form which you can use!

What else can I do to grow my subscriber lists?

As you can see from MarketingSherpa's results, list-building isn't limited to the 3 tactics above. Collecting signups in-real-life through events or in-store promotions still ranks highly in the effectiveness stakes, as does collecting email signups through a Facebook page.

Don't forget that the cornerstones to growing your lists are to stand out, offer value to subscribers and respect permission - once you have these sorted, the sky's the limit!

What list building tactics do you, or your clients use? Which have been the most effective and why? Let us know in the comments below.

Psst… It ‘wood’ be nice if all company newsletters were as lovely as Soapbox PR‘s!

Ok, so we’re being a bit cheesy here, but that’s not to say that there isn’t a lot to appreciate in this unique design by The Frontier Group. The red elements like the Soapbox logo, headings and social sharing buttons are positioned in a zig-zag pattern as you move down the one-column design, creating a harmonious visual flow. The copy in each section is brief, so there isn’t a sense of overload as you progress. It’s all very digestible, really.

When that wood-panel background image doesn’t display, there’s a fallback background color that looks just fine in the inbox. Our only suggestions would be that they should have taken advantage of the opportunity to link back to their site, if only to remind readers as to whom the newsletter is from (it’s unusual that they don’t). Secondly, it’s wise to avoid adding URLs as text to their design.

Otherwise, this is an easy-to-read, informational campaign that balances text and images and definitely reflects well on the Soapbox PR brand. Nice work!

While it's annoying that Gmail should make this rather arbitrary change, thankfully there's an easy fix. Cool customers Wilbert Heinen and Benjamin Kinzer both came up with the same solution - use a link color that's black, but not quite black. For example:

Alternately, you can use color: #000000 !important;, which oddly enough, doesn't get stripped out of the code.

In wondering what Gmail holds against the color black, we turned to Spinal Tap for answers:

When it comes to links in Gmail, anchor links can be 'none, none more black'.

Thanks to Wilbert and Ben for these fixes to a rather kooky new email rendering issue. If you see any further changes in Gmail, be sure to get in touch with us.

Here's a slick email from a creative multimedia collective, called iart interactive ag. Don't miss out on the animated gif they've added - click the thumbnail to view the header image. It's a great teaser for the matching video on their site, too.

I love it when we get to highlight campaigns in languages other than English, because it shows that you can make an email look really good when using umlauts and other unique characters.

The campaign is a one column layout but looks more like a two column layout because of the side-by-side images in each section. Nice way to break up a lot of text!

Images on:

Images off:

Given the amount of work put into this fallback, Becs at Email Fail is right to ask:

"I wonder if the general public will ever appreciate this as much as us email designers?"

Perhaps this is a clever shout-out to folks like us - an easter egg to those who intentionally turn off images in the inbox, a maker's mark amongst makers. To the Mac email designer, we tip our hats to you. Your efforts have not gone unnoticed.

For those wondering, this fallback is achieved by adding carefully cutting the image, assigning the pieces to individual table cells, then adding a bgcolor="" to each cell. Style Campaign has a free app for automatically converting images to HTML pixel-art to create a similar effect.

Thanks to Email Fail for sharing this full-of-email-win newsletter design with us!

"If you're sending Gmail messages from anywhere other than Gmail itself, they may look like phishing attempts."
-'Stop Looking Like a Phisher in Gmail', Lifehacker

Soon after a customer mentioned seeing one of these scary messages, Lifehacker posted an example, explanation and fixes in their post, 'Stop Looking Like a Phisher in Gmail'. While this information is relevant when sending from a regular email client, there's only really one way to avoid these warnings when sending from an email marketing service like Campaign Monitor. That is, use an address other than an @gmail.com address. Or any webmail address, for that matter.

Walk away from webmail addresses

This warning is only one example of how webmail clients are trying to protect their customers from spam and web threats. After all, phishers very commonly use fake From: addresses / spoof mail headers to masquerade as legitimate senders. Gmail has good reason to look dimly upon email that's labelled as coming from them, but isn't being sent from their own servers.

We encourage our customers to avoid using a webmail address as their From: email address. Undoubtedly they will trigger warnings like this and potentially, deliverability issues in the future. Instead, we highly recommend purchasing a domain name from a registrar like Namecheap and setting up a you@yournewdomain.com -style email address. It's still okay to have this domain forward inbound mail to a webmail address, or alternately, you can use Google Apps to send and manage email from this domain directly. Note that Google Apps domains have also been known to throw similar warnings - to avoid this, it's a good idea to setup email authentication, which we'll go through in the next bit.

Don't forget to set up email authentication

Finally, we'd like to remind one and all to authenticate their sending domain in their accounts, especially when using Google Apps to manage their email. In essence:

"All the large ISPs are using email authentication as an important layer in their spam fighting arsenal. By setting up this system as an authenticated sender, you can instantly bypass certain filters, giving your campaigns a better chance of arriving in the destination inbox... Many ISP's like Yahoo! and Hotmail will flag your email as authenticated, which helps to build trust between you and your subscribers and improves the chances of your emails being opened."

It only takes a few minutes for you, or your technical team to setup email authentication, but ensuring that your subscribers and ISP's know that your campaigns are definitely from you is well worth the effort.

Finally, If you have any questions about email authentication, get in touch with our team - we're here to make sure your campaigns not only look good, but make it into as many inboxes as possible, too.

Carbonmade, the awesomest portfolio site, now has their own designer and an illustrator - together, they created this beautiful email campaign. It sure is image-heavy (which we usually discourage), but still features the main message as text. Nonetheless, with a fan club of designers and illustrators, this email isn't likely to be missed. I'd just recommend moving the 'View it in your browser' to the top, since it's currently hiding below the fold and not of much use there.

They've also devised a new strategy to keep a faithful audience, that is, complimenting designers on how good they smell!

I know what you're thinking - just as we're coming to grips with optimizing our email newsletters for mobile, suddenly we have tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire to make things interesting again. So here's the good and the bad news. The good: if you've already created a responsive design for the iPhone, then adapting this for the iPad and similar devices is dead easy. The bad: it still requires extra testing, coding and sooner-or-later, it's going to be what all your clients are asking for.

Before we provide any solid answers on whether or not we should all be optimizing our email campaigns for tablet devices, lets look at their uptake and some basic techniques for adapting your design for small, yet not-so-small screens.

Why optimize for tablet devices?

The skinny is that tablet devices are getting popular. I'm sure you know of more than a few people who begged for Kindle Fires for Christmas, then got slipped a Motorola Xoom by Santa instead. Or snapped up an iPad 2 the moment they were launched. Our friends at Return Path collected the hard numbers in a recent report, citing:

"In our last study we reported a 15% increase in iPad use relative to iPhone use... What we find is that the use of iPads has exploded – with an increase of 73% in email views on iPad devices between April and September of 2011. Email views on the iPad jumped by 12% between March... and April, then continued the steady climb upward."
- 'Mobile, Webmail, Desktops: Where Are We Viewing Email Now?', Return Path, 2011

In June 2011, we found that iPad usage accounted for almost 15% of opens tracked on mobile devices and 3% of email opens overall. Given Return Path's recent findings and our own observations, this is rapidly growing and potentially cannibalizing iPhone market share while it's at it. We'll be sure to provide usage stats for other tablet devices as they come to hand, so watch this space.

Adapting mobile code for slightly larger screens

As mentioned earlier, if you're already in the habit of optimizing your campaigns for mobile screens (or have exported a template from our template builder), then you've already done most of the legwork. What's remains is the addition of a slightly different @media query, targeting the display dimensions of tablet devices. Here's a typical @media query for mobile devices, followed by the adapted equivalent for the Kindle Fire, iPad and Xoom:

The good team at Email on Acid have a brilliant summary of all the different @media query combos you can use to target specific tablet devices (and orientations), however for the sake of brevity and maintenance, it's probably worth focusing on 2 generic ones like in the sample above.

If the above is a bit of a mystery, I highly recommend reading our 'Mobile Email Design in Practice' post, as well as creating and exporting a template from our template builder to see how it all clicks under the hood.

So, should I rejig my email design for tablet devices?

Ultimately, this decision should be made by consulting the email client usage report in your Campaign Monitor account. For example, 4.9% of all opens for our recent December newsletter originated from an iPad. In March (when the iPad 2 launched), this figure was 2.7%. In 9 months, the iPad's share of opens has nearly doubled. That indicates to us that even if the iPad is a minor player in the email client scene at present, it's probably not going to remain that way for good. Either way, having the know-how when it comes to optimizing your email campaigns for tablet devices is going to become an increasingly sought-after skill in an email designer's stable, so it makes good sense to test out these techniques now, before your clients force you to.

Do you optimize your designs specifically for tablet devices? Do you have any great tips? Let us know in the comments below.

Here’s a great example of what can be done if you use an email template as a starting point for your own campaigns. The folks at Postbox transformed our ‘Sample Template’ into this impossibly-clean design; a gorgeous marketing piece that also reinforces their own website branding.

It’s great to see that the same attention to detail that has been put into their app has also been extended to their email updates. All ‘round, a great email to receive in any email client, from a top notch email client at that.

Cabedge: Putting personality into it

A few months ago, our great friends at Cabedge launched a radically new company site. So radical, that they decided to send this proactive campaign in anticipation of what their subscribers would say. They're a funny gang and know it - the 'Top 5 beefs' does as much in the way of sharing their identity and brand of humor as inducing people to visit their site. Ten points for personality, a lovely layout and nice use of type, I say.

Alertful for Business: Graceful in all conditions

Talking about uplifting, here's a great example of a launch email that sure may look detailed, but comes back down to earth gracefully when images are blocked. The use of 'backup' calls to action (note the red 'Click here to try the service for free') is a technique we don't see enough of - but undoubtedly does its part in pushing response rates sky-high. Great work by the Email Spring team!

Flexibits: Focused on one task

When it comes to email designs, we've always said, 'keep it simple'. The Flexibits campaign designed by Komodo Media is a perfect example of this in practice, with its easy-to-skim message and a single call to action ('Grab a Free Trial!'). There's absolutely no visual clutter, or confusion as to what the email recipient should do after receiving the message - which I'm sure was their goal to begin with.

Different Projects: Picture this

Now, I know what we say about images in email (ie. be careful, they often get blocked), but this campaign by Different Projects has added some really eye-catching ones to great effect. The text-boxes tacked on top of the illustrations give visual depth to the design. As they contain actual text, won't disappear when images are turned off.

All around, a great way to announce a move, while wowing clients with a little creative flair.

Virb: Getting the message across

Finally, I wanted to showcase a corporate-style campaign. One that carefully balances copy with visual elements to communicate detailed information. If only to prove that such a thing exists. Duly, I came across this email announcement by Virb, which has a serious side, but doesn't forget to have a little fun while it's at it.

In appearance, it's totally austere - all clean lines and shades of business-like blue. But the text is full of personality, easy-to-read and is complimented by images of their upcoming product. It's almost the opposite of what many of us imagine a corporate email to contain: stodgy layouts, stock photography and endless columns of teeny-tiny text.

Hopefully you've enjoyed our brief round-up. If there are any particular themes you would like to see us cover (eg. emails for hotels, charities etc), let us know - we'd be happy to shine the light on some great examples for you.

This fresh and friendly design by the multi-talented team at MyFan feels a lot more personal than the typical corporate newsletter. The illustrated arrows and casual font work well and because the campaign is using actual text it still works if the images don't load.

We also appreciate the clear reminder about the new company name, something that can lead to complaints and confusion if not handled well. Read our blog post for more advice on how to handle name changes too.

What’s better, the Digital Delivery App team offer fairly comprehensive support, via both their site and email. We took a moment to set up an account, upload products and get both Campaign Monitor and PayPal integration happening. Now, if only we really had something fancy to sell...

Add a 'Buy Now' button to your site in 10 minutes

The loveliness of Digital Delivery App is that it asks for so little, yet gives so much in return. Upon creating an account (free for the first 30 days), you are run through initial setup process that sorts out the fundamentals of selling content online - namely, selecting a payment gateway and adding something to sell. The fastest way to get up and running is to have a PayPal, Google Checkout, AlertPay or Stripe account already linked to the email address you signed up with... And of course, to have that ‘something’ either ready to upload, or already hosted somewhere.

What we found particularly generous is that the app offers to host your sellable digital content. Once you upload your files to the app, simply take the ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Add to Cart’ button code it generates for each product and add it to an existing site. It even generates license keys to prevent software products from being looted.

Alternately, you can host everything yourself and only use Digital Delivery App to handle the transaction side of things.

Once you’ve gotten to this point in the setup process, you probably would have noticed how all-encompassing the app is. It unfurls like a flower as you click on top-level options, revealing the facility to offer discount codes, create referral codes, send post-purchase order emails, sell packages of products and view detailed reports. There’s even an API and web interface for webhooks. While Digital Delivery App shares much in common with the big-name shopping cart and e-commerce apps out there, it does so without feeling bloated, or requiring you to install anything on your end.

Automate your post-purchase email marketing

Digital Delivery App scratches two little itches that we’ve had for a while now, being the sending of transactional email and pushing email addresses from checkout to subscriber list. As mentioned earlier, the app handles the sending of customizable, plain-text order emails, with a link to the digital item the customer just purchased. As a template already exists in Digital Delivery App for this, the app will automatically start sending these personalized emails from the very first order.

Secondly, once you’ve set up Campaign Monitor integration, you can count on Digital Delivery App to add the email addresses of new customers to an existing subscriber list in your account. All you need is your account’s API key and a List ID.

As a result, you can start sending a series of autoresponders upon purchase - for instance, polling new customers for feedback - or simply add email addresses to a ‘Paying customers’ list to receive relevant updates (taking into account permission, of course). Digital Delivery App also offers subscription-based transactions, meaning that you can offer paid newsletter subscriptions, access to exclusive tutorials or similar paywalled content for a recurring fee.

No win, no fee

Just like those legal practices you see on late-night TV, Digital Delivery App doesn't charge unless you make a sale during the monthly billing cycle. So if you take a few months off selling things, you don't have to cancel your account. All accounts come with a 30 day free trial (during which you don't have to commit your credit card/PayPal details), after which your plan comes into effect. With monthly plans starting from $9 USD per month, it's not exactly a wallet-burner, either.

After spending a few entertaining moments setting up a faux store for Minecraft maps, it was fairly clear to us that this will be a useful integration to customers who would like to offer paid content without having to use a fully-blown eCommerce platform. If this sounds like you, swing on over to their site, take a tour and give it a try. After all, good content sells - just ask Louis CK.

Elusive and minimalist can be used to describe this template from ALSOKNOWNAS. Using a simple monochromatic colour palette (primarily shades of grey and black), it sparingly uses color to boldly highlight parts of the newsletter against its concrete-grey background color. The use of crisp monospace fonts gives it an industrial look, which thankfully isn't difficult to read on both regular monitors and mobile devices.

Overall, this is a really simple and effective template, with attitude that's as solid as the one-column template itself. You can't help but wonder about the seemingly-intential typo in the header - but perhaps that's what they were hoping for.

As you (and probably your wallet) know, this is the season for giving, as well as reflecting. So while the tinsel gets taken down for yet another year at Campaign Monitor -sponsored Xmas events like WebBlast Sydney, lets look at some of the events we've supported via our Giving Back Program and hopefully, get you involved in the year ahead.

Our Giving Back Program has supported dozens of web design and development events for close to three years now, plus offered free accounts to select email senders. So if you're running an event in the new year that you think could benefit from pizza, beer, a tweet-out and free email credits on us, it's a great time to get in touch.

What kind of events do you support?

Since our first event in 2009, Campaign Monitor have powered our email newsletters and helped cover our running costs. We don't advertise, so it's only through word-of-mouth and email that we can spread the news. We wouldn't be able to run Ignite Sydney without their support.
- Stephen Lead, Ignite Sydney

Our Giving Back Program is all about returning the favor to the web designers and developers who have stood by us since Campaign Monitor's humble beginnings back in 2004. Since the Program's launch, we've had the pleasure of getting behind events that resonate with us and our customers, including Semi-Permanent and both Refresh and Ignite internationally. We even power newsletters for SXSW... And attend!

That said, you don't have to run a high-profile conference to qualify - smaller design-focused gigs like BAMMD and user groups like EEUK very regularly get a hat-tip from us.

How can I get involved?

If your event could benefit from a free Campaign Monitor account, a modest bar tab (like our friends at the Portsmouth Freelancers Meet, pictured) or email credits as a door prize, let us know and we'll be sure to give it a look. We're especially keen to visit your website and get the lowdown on previous events, so be sure to pass on those details, too.

Finally, a huge thanks to everyone who has invited us to support their gathering, or attended an event that we sponsored this year. As the Giving Back Program continues to gain momentum, we're looking forward to enlivening more design nights, dishing out more pizza and giving more to people like you.

We're keen to explore other meaningful ways we can give back to the web community, so if you have a suggestion as to how we can make a positive impact on what you do, from providing more design resources, to getting the word out about your design meetup, pop us a line, or let us know in the comments below. All of us here are looking forward to making 2012 an awesome one for you and your clients!

Part of the reason this stylish, minimalist newsletter from design agency Naughty Fish looks so good is because of the impressive images they’ve added into their campaign. Paired with a deceptively simple layout, this newsletter does a great job at showcasing their amazing work, while not slipping into the territory of being an ‘image heavy’ campaign.

I must admit, I’m also a sucker for typography and the subtle use of colour, and this is another thing Naughty Fish do well here; Georgia is the perfect font for this ‘magazine’ styled design, and I love the way they’ve highlighted their table of contents in the left-hand column using a cool blue, then have highlighted their subscriber links and contact details just below this using a dusky orange.

All-in-all an impressive and pixel perfect campaign which I suspect would look just as good in Outlook 2007 as it would in Apple Mail.

But that's not all - we've also got an easy-to-use 'Season's Greetings' email template, free to use and tweak. Plus, if you send a holiday-themed campaign in December, you will also go into the running to win our annual holiday email competition, so hop in your sleigh and go!

Nine inspiring Christmas email designs by our customers

From animated GIFs to pixel art, here are some of our old and new favorite Christmas email designs, including a template builder creation by Tangelo, tees by Threadless and image-free pixel art by Style Campaign. Click to view these campaigns:

Thinking it may be too late to send your own design? Up next, we have an email template that you can load up in your account to share the love.

Send a sprinkle of snow with our holiday email template

Last week, we added a charming 'Seasons Greetings' design to our collection of 100+ free email templates. Featuring pure CSS animation and rock solid email client support, it's great for sharing a sprinkle of holiday cheer!

Even if you caught it back then, it's worth getting the refreshed version for the recent updates, including smoother snow in Chrome and snow in Firefox. With hardly a day to lose before Christmas, it's time to get started on your holiday campaign!

Finally, our holiday email competition for 2011

As is our tradition at this time of year, we've got a sack-load of goodies to give to our customers in our annual holiday email design competition. One lucky winner will receive a:

• Kindle Fire *
• FitBit Ultra, or ~ $100 to back the Kickstarter project of their choice
• 50,000 email credits

* For non-US customers, we can arrange an alternative prize

In addition, 3 runners up will receive a prize of 10,000 email credits each. That's a lot of free emails to kick off 2012!

How to enter win

To go into the running, simply send a holiday-themed campaign during December - if you have already, then you're in it to win it! Our team will be sifting through and shortlisting Christmas campaigns as part of their regular review process, then selecting our winners in early 2012. If you've got an outstanding campaign that you think should make the cut, you're welcome to send us a link, too!

Finally, we're not looking for Hallmark card tackiness, just technically and visually awesome HTML emails. If your email campaign displays nicely across the major email clients, has a few mobile optimizations and is an actual email design, not an awkwardly resized website, then there's a great chance that it will be shortlisted. Image-only emails may look nice at first glance, but aren't likely be chosen by the guys and gals here.

Now we've got you inspired, templated up and motivated, it's time for you to crank out those end-of-year campaigns - good luck and happy sending!

This is one of those emails where the first thing I thought was “I wish I’d designed that.” I’m a big fan of bringing the opening paragraph right up to the top along with the branding. It’s clear who the email is from, but Different Projects displays some humility and immediately delivers what’s important to the recipients.

My favorite part? Look at the fun way the text boxes overlap and interact with the images, all accomplished with clever, email-friendly tables. Lots of white space, clean, consistently branded with their website, all around a fine fine job.

A preheader (otherwise known as a 'Johnson Box', haw haw) is the the short summary text that follows the subject line when an email is viewed in the inbox. Many mobile, desktop and web email clients provide them to tip you off on what the email contains, before you open it. Here's an example in Gmail:

Generally this line of text (in this case, 'Wishing you a safe and merry holiday season!') is borrowed from the first text found in the email campaign. On mobile clients in particular, the preheader can mean the difference between someone opening your email and archiving it - so you generally want it to be something meaningful. Like a summary of your offer, not your campaign's webversion message or the remnants of social sharing links. Because believe it or not, they work. From our friend, Elliott Ross:

"In my experience we’ve implemented it (preheaders) on a number of campaigns and it’s raised open rates, click thrus and reduced spam complaints."
- "The Perfect Email Preheader/Johnson Box", Email Design Review

A lot of designers make their preheaders very visible by adding a short summary to the very top of their designs, but personally, I like to hide my preheaders and forget about them altogether. Lets go through the nitty gritty of how to do this.

Adding a preheader to an email campaign

The first thing to ask is if you have to worry about a preheader at all. For instance, if your email already cuts to the chase and the first text that appears does a good job of summarizing what's to follow, then you may not have to add one. But for the rest of us, a little bit of text just after the <body> tag in your HTML email code usually suffices:

If you're like many senders that add a nice visible summary, you can stop here and style it up all you like. But as I mentioned earlier, I prefer to hide mine:

The above still displays in Lotus Notes - if this is an issue, try adding font-size:1px; to the .preheader styles, and/or using the same color for both the text and background.

Automatically adding a meaningful preheader with our email editor

The major downsides to using the above preheader technique are:

1. It's easy to forget to update the preheader text
2. When using templates, customizing the preheader for each campaign is a lot of hassle

Cool customer Mark Shingleton came up with an ingenious way to ensure the preheader in his campaigns looks good each time - adding a table of contents to the top using our template tag language:

Not everyone can make the design decision to place a table of contents at the top of their campaigns, however if you or your clients are using the email editor to build campaigns, you can use the text that is automatically generated by a combination of repeatertitle="true" on headings and <tableofcontents> in our template language to fill the <span> tags we were using earlier:

What you'll end up with is a preheader consisting of headings from the articles in your email campaign (pictured).

The beauty of this is that it's totally set-and-forget - your clients can take a template and add articles in the email editor, while being totally oblivious to the whole preheader thing. But the downside is that you can only add one table of contents to your campaign (sorry!), so you either feature one in your design, or use it for the preheader.

Update: It turns out that we posted about an alternative method for adding preheaders - using the alt attribute in a 1x1px image - back in 2006. You can't use this method to autofill the preheader with template tags, but if you're manually adding one, check it out.

Now, I'd love to know how you use preheaders - are they important to you? Do you have a particular technique that you use in your email campaigns and templates? Let us know in the comments below.