Content Marketing Today

Your eMail Campaign May Succeed or Fail in the Preview Pane

If you get it right, your buyers will read and respond. If you get it wrong, your target customers will dump your e-mails.

In a great series of e-mail related posts on his Conversion Rate blog, Brett Gilbertson reminds us that unless we pay attention to design details, we may be wasting the money we’re spending on our e-mail campaigns.

As with so many aspects of life and of business, it’s often the little things that make a big difference. So it is with making sure that your e-mail preview pane does not dissuade your recipients from opening your e-mail.  Conversely, if you get it right, you can will persuade them to open your e-mail and pay attention to what you have to say. 

I was holding my breath until I saw that Brett selected our eNewsletter on the right as one of the good guys.

As  Brett  notes, “e-mail is a time sensitive medium.”  We all receive way too many e-mails every day.  Therefore, we often decide in nanoseconds whether to delete, save for later, or read right away.  As we know, most of those “save for later” e-mails are ultimately deleted without having been read.

Using Borders Australia as an example, he shows what happens when Outlook 2003 blocks the image.  You see precisely nothing. There is neither Borders branding nor any kind of message that would prompt you to open the e-mail. When you imagine the size of their e-mail list and the number of recipients who saw no image, you can imagine how much money was wasted on the campaign.  Since most of us don’t have the Borders budget, we cannot afford to make these kinds of mistakes

Even when you take the time to click so that you can download the image, there is very little happening that would entice you to continue reading.  There is no special offer.  There isn’t a list of books that match your preferences.  There absolutely nothing that says, “read me now.”

Brett concludes,

“If the reader can’t pick up the scent in 1/2 a second, then it may be time to rethink your email marketing execution.”

• Definitely check out Brett’s Conversion Rate blog.  If you want to read more about preview panes, click here.  If you’d like examples of really bad ones, click here.  If you would rather find out what kinds of preview panes you should be emulating, click here.  To see what else Brett has say about e-mail marketing, click here.
• You may also want to read about a great eNewsletter from BookSurge that we profiled recently , by clicking here.