Most modern email readers display a snippet of text from the beginning of each email as a teaser that helps users know whether it is something they want to open and read. You can see this small bit of text in Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Apple’s Mail.app client, and even the iPhone email application. This text is also what your reader will see if their email client has blocked all of your big pretty images. Some marketers refer to this text as the message preheader.

You probably already know how important a compelling title is for your email marketing campaign’s open/read rate. Good ad copy always begins with a interesting, informative headline. The headline’s job is to sell the sales copy, so that the sales copy will be able to sell the product. You can use the email snippet text to enhance the allure of your headline, to provide extra information, or to strongly direct attention to a call for action.

Email Teaser Text As A Second Headline

In traditional advertisement copywriting, the first line is one of the most important pieces of text in the entire ad, article, or sales letter. It is often seen as second only to the headline itself. The job of the first line is to convince the reader that they want to keep reading.

The email teaser can very effectively serve this function, because it gives the reader a window into the message you want them to read. You may not be able to predict how many words of teaser copy will be displayed in the reader’s email client, so try stack the beginning of your sentence with language that is vivid, exciting, and seductive. Introduce something out of the ordinary, provoke curiosity, or promise to answer a nagging question for your demographic. If you do your job well, your open/read count should see a strong increase.

Writing Informative Email Preheaders

Another tactic for utilizing the email preheader text is to pack it with important information that would have been too much for the title. This way you can formulate a punch, attention-getting headline for the title, and immediately back it up with a solid reason for opening and reading the message.

This one-two punch is great if your readers are heavy internet and email users, who will tend to quickly pre-screen their messages. You quickly grab their attention, and then offer a quick justification for why that attention was justified. Again, you have no way of knowing how much information will fit into the email browser’s preview snippet, so aim for compact and concrete nuggets of information. Numbers, percentages, promises.

Email Snippets As A Direct Call For Action

If you’re the type of marketer that likes to strike early and strike often, then you may feel attracted to the idea of using the snippet text in your email campaigns as a direct call to action. And your instincts may not be wrong. Many marketers report excellent results from this technique.

The very first line of the email is a great place to pitch an exclusive offer, a special discount, or even to request that the reader forward your email to a friend.

As Always, Split-Test Your Messages For Best Results

In many cases you’ll want to mix and match these techniques to make the most of your email campaign. And the only way you can ever really know which ad copy is the most effective in getting your desired results is to test multiple different versions against one another.

If you’re using our ActiveCampaign Email Marketing software, this is going to be a lot easier. All you have to do is write up multiple versions of your email preheader copy, tell the software what percentage of your list to use as a test sample, and let it choose the winning ad copy based on the actions of your readers.

As we enter into another holiday season, you’ll want to spend some time considering ways to fine-tune your email marketing campaigns. There are certainly unique opportunities for a variety of business sectors in this season. There are also some pitfalls that you should be mindful of if you want to maximize the effectiveness of your messages.

Everybody’s Doing It

The holiday season is the time of year when people are receiving the highest number of marketing and advertising messages. More than any other time, ineffective message are going to be lost in the crowd. To make your message stand out in the crowd, you’ll have to do two things:

1. Offer something very good
2. Be very specific about it

Just watch your own behavior as the holiday special offers come streaming into your inbox. Messages with generic or vague titles are likely the first to be deleted without being read. Whose got the patience? Try to use your title to encapsulate the full message in as few words as possible. Tell people exactly what you have for them, and the ones who want it will open and read.

The body of the email should be similarly punchy. How often do you ever spend more than 30 seconds reading a marketing email? You would have to be very, very interested in the information or offer you had received. You’re more likely to get a response from your readers if the email itself is short and to the point. If the email has done its job, your readers will follow your links to your more in-depth pages of product details, sales copy, etc.

Timing Is Everything

Before you send your messages, go back through your archives to see what time of day and day of the week your subscribers tend to open their messages the most frequently. While Sunday and Monday afternoon are the days when email marketing messages generally get opened the most, this can vary widely depending on what industry you are in and who your clients are. If you use our Email Marketing software, you can set your campaign to automatically send to each subscriber at the time of day that they initially subscribed to your list. This can be great if you have subscribers in many different time zones, because you can be assured that you’re sending during a time that they are awake and likely to be exposed to incoming messages.

We talk a lot on this blog about the fundamentals of effective email marketing campaigns:

• Building relationships
• Establishing trust
• Solving problems

If you stick to those fundamentals, you’ll not only sell a lot of product, but you’ll also avoid the type of lawsuit that Toyota is now facing as a result of its “Maniacs” campaign to promote the Toyota Matrix.

An overly-creative advertising team at Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles created a set of email autoresponder series for Toyota, each designed to make the recipient think that they were being stalked by a maniac. Then they used the video below to get pranksters to sign their friends up for these autoresponder email campaigns.

AdAge reported on one of the thousands of recipients of these bizarre messages, Amber Duick, who is now suing both Toyota and the Saatchi ad company.

Ms. Duick received a series of rambling messages appearing to be from a rabid soccer fan and riot participant named Sebastian Bowler. She received links to his Myspace page, copies of hotel bills that Sebastian Bowler was apparently holding her responsible for, and indications that he was on his way to her home to visit her in person.

According to her attorney, Ms. Duick “was terrified. She slept with a machete next to her bed and she slept with mace. She could barely sleep or eat normally.”

It was not until the ninth email message that Ms. Duick was informed that “she had been punked” and the whole ordeal had been part of a marketing campaign for the Toyota Matrix. Ms. Duick is probably not likely to purchase a Toyota vehicle in the near future.

This is a classic example of a poorly thought out marketing strategy backfiring. You don’t need to be a renegade artist to effectively sell your product, and in fact it is probably better if you’re not. All you need to do to effectively market yourself online is to follow the old tried and true principles of good business. The new media is an awful lot like the old, just a lot faster. You start with a high-quality email marketing software package, offer good reasons why your product solves your reader’s problems, and track your results.

We recently discussed the explosion of direct email marketing compared to other types of consumer outreach. We discussed some of the unique advantages of email marketing as a medium, as well as some of the economic reasons for its growth.

One thing we did not explore is the fact that opt in email marketing may be getting more effective over time. This is counter-intuitive to some extent. Most marketers would expect that the more email newsletters and special offers a company sends out, the more likely they are to induce consumer fatigue become invisible to their most important market segments.

In certain ways this is true. You don’t want to send out a deluge of messages only to find that you have desensitized your audience. But even though email marketing may not necessarily gain effectiveness at the individual level, on the whole you can count on the fact that people are becoming more technologically savvy. As this happens, people should become more and more comfortable with online marketing replacing their traditional offline counterparts. More importantly, they should become more responsive to online direct marketing.

According to a new study by the prominent marketing firm Epsilon, this is exactly what is taking place. The study found that the upcoming generation of adults (ages 18-25) are more receptive to opt in email offers than their older peers.

A higher percentage of millennials report that they want to receive certain types of permission-based emails more than once a day including specials/offers from online merchants (34%), entertainment (32%), sports (28%), special offers from traditional (offline) retailers (26%), electronics information (21%), and telecommunications information (21%).

Millennials want to receive offers more often and are willing to stay in programs rather than their elders who are more likely to unsubscribe.

The researchers concluded that using email segmentation to target specific demographics is particularly important in light of this data. While we agree with this conclusion and strongly support the use of highly personalized and well-segmented email marketing campaigns, we also see a message of encouragement for early adopters of internet-based forms of marketing and advertisement.

As the important younger generation of adults continue to fill positions of power and prominence, the companies that have worked to form relationships with them will also prosper. This is an important time to start gaining experience with direct online marketing. The sooner you buy email marketing software and start building up your mailing list, the more entrenched you’ll become in the most valuable segments of your market.

Many business owners fail to realize what an excellent opportunity email marketing provides for developing lasting relationships with customers and potential customers who you meet offline. In much the same way that regular mailings can keep visitors coming back to your web site, they can also keep visitors coming back to your brick & mortar location. Regular e-mail contact with offline customers also provides all the other benefits of email marketing to online clients: increased brand recognition, improved familiarity and trust, and an opportunity for you to expand the perceived usefulness of your products and services.

There are a near infinite variety of ways in which you can recruit mailing list subscribers offline, and the ways that are appropriate for your business will depend on the opportunities for interacting with clients that your business normally affords you. For example, if you run a retail business, it is both simple and highly effective to simply place a signup sheet on the counter. An even better tactic is to ask each customer if they would like to sign up for your e-mail list as they are checking out.

If you work with clients over longer-term projects or in a business-to-business setting, there are even more strategies you can employ to encourage contacts to sign up for your mailing list. One very simple way to do this is to advertise your newsletter on your business card. Just a few words describing the information you provide in the mailings and a URL to sign up at will draw more subscribers than you might expect, and they will tend to be very high-quality and high-converting subscribers.

These days it is standard practice to send a follow-up e-mail to a new contact, and this is a perfect opportunity to mention your newsletter in a way that can come across as more helpful than self-promoting. You should also very seriously consider adding a small advertisement for your newsletter to your e-mail signature and also onto your letterhead and invoices. This way everyone you come in contact with in a professional capacity will become aware of the additional information that you provide, which in turn will keep them aware of your products and services.

Any event at which you are speaking or presenting information is also a fantastic opportunity to build up your mailing list. Let your audience know what you provide through the list and why it will be helpful to them. Then simply pass around a signup sheet or collect business cards for people that would like to subscribe. These are methods of generating highly qualified leads that will pay off greatly in the long term. Follow this link for more email marketing tips.