The Approachable, Smiling Face of Your Email

Looking over a sea of faces at a networking event the other night, it struck me how some individuals stood out in the crowd while others I barely noticed. The ones that stood out had a friendly look to them and usually a smile on their faces. Since I spend way too much time thinking about email marketing, it struck me how much this visual filtering of the crowd was similar to what I do with my inbox whenever I get a new message.

It’s hard to believe, but a good number of people are not actually looking at your whole email. They are, in fact, just looking at the top area (also known as the preview pane) and judging your email from that, just as I was judging the people in the crowd based only on the look on their faces.

According to Marketing Sherpa, 33% of online customers use preview panes to view emails. Are you one of the 33%? I know I’m in the 33%, but the funny thing is, everyone I talk to says they are using preview panes to screen their emails. I’ll bet that if Marketing Sherpa conducts the same research next year, the number will be higher.

Since the preview pane is typically the top 2 to 4 inches of your email, what you put in that space will often make or break your message. Think of it this way: how you look in the preview pane is the equivalent of the approachable, smiling face of your email. So what are you doing with this space?

My advice is that every email should showcase three things to grab the attention of your readers:
 
1. Readers need to know who you are, so put your logo in the top 2 to 4 inches of your email, and include some text that identifies the name of your organization. The text name is to help if your reader has images turned off, so he or she will clearly know who the email is from. Just don’t make the logo too big. One of the most common errors I see is an organization’s logo so big that it takes up the entire preview pane. Great. I know who the email is from. Now tell me why I should care. Which brings us to the second tip ...

2. Answer the question of why readers should care about the message in your email. Ensure that your readers can see a headline in the preview pane that is interesting and enticing.

3. Creating a newsletter that includes multiple topics? Always have a table of contents visible in the preview pane. Be sure to showcase a couple article headlines in the in the preview pane so readers can see them. If a reader cannot see the listings, they do not know the content is there. The likelihood that they would scroll down to look for them is small to none.

Give these three tips a try and let me know how they work for you.

Trend to watch: With the drop in price of smartphones like the Blackberry and iPhone, there is a considerable increase in the number of people using them to read their personal emails. Forrester Research reports that “one in 10 consumers is triaging their primary personal email accounts on handheld devices.” Knowing this, preview your Constant Contact email and make sure the three things I wrote about above are visible in a smaller mobile screen.