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Posts Tagged ‘email preview pane’

Bring Email Content to the Top

Posted by Dave McCue on October 18th, 2010

Emails viewed in preview pane windows—or those that extend below the fold when viewed in full—often see a lack of reader engagement with content closer to the bottom of the message. Many recipients make the decision to stay or go based on what they see near the top of a message without scrolling further, thereby missing out on potentially valuable content.

If your email messages tend to be on the longer side, including a table of contents near the top of each message is a good way to present recipients with all of the available options in your message. Through the use of HTML anchor tags, clickable items in a table of contents can lead recipients to the point in the message where the content appears, eliminating the need for any scrolling.

hgtv

For example, if I have “Summer Sweepstakes” listed among my table of contents, I would link that item like this:
<a href=”#Sweepstakes”>Summer Sweepstakes</a>.

Further down in my message code, I would insert an anchor with a name attribute at the point where my Sweepstakes content begins, like this: <a name=”Sweepstakes”></a>.

This second anchor would serve as the destination point for users who click on the Sweepstakes link in my table of contents.  Using this approach, recipients who don’t scroll down in the message will at least get an idea of what lies below, and may decide to engage with content they otherwise might not have seen at all.

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The Preview Pane from your Customers’ POV

Posted by admin on August 27th, 2009

The importance of optimizing your email marketing messages for preview pane viewing cannot be understated. Once you’ve gotten someone to click on your message with a winning subject line, the next step would be to make sure that you capture their attention in the preview pane viewing area.

It’s important to keep in mind the varying sizes of monitors, screen resolutions and the actual preview pane itself. Taking a worst-case-scenario approach, here is a view of my inbox in Yahoo! on my 17” laptop:

yahoo_inbox1

Again, this is my size preference so others may vary, but I personally try to keep about half of my inbox viewable and the other half for preview pane viewing.  Here is a look at a few messages once I click on them:

Sears:
sears_email

Jet Blue:

jet_blue

Amazon:
amazon_email

Out of these three selections, Amazon does a really nice job of optimizing the preview pane with several links and reiterates the subject line promoting Blu-ray Movies.  By having multiple touchpoints in the preview pane area, they have greatly increased their chances of getting someone to click.

For more great information on preview pane optimization, check out these other blog posts:

Email Marketing Minute – Power of the Preview Pane

Are Your Subscribers Organized? Why It’s Better to Assume the Worst

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