In part one, we covered designing an email campaign, avoiding the spam filter and improving your open rate. This process is analogous to getting your serve in play in a tennis match—it’s essential if you want a chance at winning the point, let alone the game, set, or match.
And I tried to put email marketing in context by pointing out this juicy statistic from the Direct Marketing Association: For every dollar the average business invests in email marketing, it gets $48 in return. Today we’re going to discuss the following: optimizing your layout for the preview pane. As you read this post, keep that $48 figure in mind!
Let’s back up. So far, you’ve gotten the green light from the spam filter and made it into the inbox. Your ‘from’ and ‘subject’ lines were either familiar or enticing enough to prompt the person to open your email. While these are great victories, you’re far from done!
Designing for the preview pane
What’s the ‘preview pane’? It’s the user-interface that most email applications, such as Outlook, Lotus Notes and Apple Mail (pictured), use to display email. And most users—people like you, your customers and me—typically stick to the default preview pane settings: horizontal alignment with email images blocked.
What does this mean for your email marketing message? For one thing, no matter how much time you spend making your email visually appealing, it’s going appear fragmented to the average recipient, especially if you have a lot of graphics at the top.
I don’t suggest that you ditch all design in favor of plain text emails. Most users will unblock images once they’re comfortable that your message isn’t spam. But you’ve got only a fraction of second and a tiny sliver of screen space to earn enough trust/interest to get the person to keep reading and possibly unblock your images.
Alt text to the rescue!
Alt text is what shows up when an email client blocks images, so it acts as an image description. (Alt text is intended to describe images to Internet users who are visually impaired.) Alt text gives you the opportunity to communicate to the recipient. It’s important to use alt text to reinforce who you are and why prospects should care about your email.
Here’s an example of an image-heavy email that doesn’t use any alt text. As you can see, Sam’s Club is missing a big opportunity here—all that canvas and not a single word about their great holiday deals!
This is what the email is supposed to look like:
In this example, J. Crew does a marginally better job, at least getting their name in the alt text. But think of how much more effective it would be if they included the offer as well.
We can give points to J.Crew and Sam’s Club for at least having header text that encourages people to view the email in a browser. But the text is small and doesn’t reference any of the content in the email.
Depending on the email marketing tool you use, you can typically add alt text when you’re uploading an image. Some tools, Kutenda included, make it very easy to add. (If you’re in the market for new email marketing software, be sure to ask how easy it is to add alt text to your photos and graphics.)
The preview pane typically hides a large chunk—the middle and bottom—of your email, so it’s important to put key information in the top inch or two of your email. By ‘key information’ we mean your business logo, which creates recognition, and your messaging, which creates interest (we hope). The more compelling the introduction, the more likely the reader will engage further. Remember, most people are flooded with email and will look for any reason to ignore yours; by getting to the point quickly, you have a better shot at drawing prospects deeper into your message and closer to your conversion point.
0
