Emails have several essential components that marketers have to consider. These components typically include such things as a subject line and a header. There are other components, however, that the savvy email marketer such as yourself would be wise not to discount.
One of these components worthy of your consideration is an email preheader. Read on to discover what you need to know about email preheaders and what they can do to help your brand’s email marketing.
What is an email preheader?
You can think of an email preheader as the text that comes before the email’s header. This snippet of text can be used to include additional directive details that can guide your readers.
An email preheader is essentially an extension of the subject line. As such, you should include information that’s relevant to (yet more specific than) the subject line. These sections can also be used to create highly effective holiday email campaigns. For example, you can use your preheader text for a catchy tagline related to your holiday of choice. The subject line can then outline a more direct message, such as the announcement of an upcoming sale.
It’s generally considered good practice for email preheaders to be between 85-100 characters. The restrictive character cap encourages text that’s catchy, concise, and direct.
You can use tools from Campaign Monitor to provide automated preheaders with the email editor.
How to measure the efficiency of email preheaders
To measure the success of your email preheaders, you can turn to standard marketing metrics like open and click-through rates. The open rate represents the number of emails that were opened by your recipients. The click-through rate indicates how many people who read your email chose to click on one of your links. Both of these are essential email marketing metrics to check when analyzing your preheaders.
You should run those metrics against your subscribe and unsubscribe rates to get a clearer picture. For example, if your unsubscribe rates increase sharply after the introduction of certain preheaders, then you should adjust them accordingly.
When you make effective use of preheaders and make them compelling enough for people to open your emails, your conversion rates will rise.
Note the use of the preheader in this example. The preheader includes the brand name as well as essential selling points, like “organic” and “natural.”
Source: Campaign Monitor
Does it really matter?
Preheaders matter. These sections are a golden opportunity for email marketers to include catchy taglines and other information to sway leads and customers. As an extension of the subject line, preheaders are an essential component of any newsletter. They also prevent the field from being populated with garbled text due to auto-formatting malfunctions.
When preheaders are overlooked, a brand can lose ground. Each and every bit of content is important. Neglecting key areas like email preheaders is a waste of an opportunity to engage further with your customers.
A sobering 57% of B2B marketers listed measuring content effectiveness among the most significant challenges.
You know how difficult it can be to generate subscribers through email marketing. You also know how hard it is to keep subscribers engaged with wave after wave of fresh content. With so much at stake, you need to take advantage of every opportunity.
What now?
Now that you’ve learned more about email preheaders, it’s time to put your newfound knowledge into action. Start maximizing your use of email preheader sections today, and learn even more with Campaign Monitor.