the voice of email
Welcome to the Email Experience Council's blog, a forum for the email marketing industry's
leading voices. On these pages, you'll find the opinions and thought-leadership that's driving the next evolution of email.
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the voices of email
The Email Experience Council's membership includes many of the brightest and most committed email marketing experts. We're pleased to have some of them share their insights here on these pages. Our blog contributors include:
Jordan Ayan is the chairman of Create-It!, a technology consulting organization, as well as the CEO of
SubscriberMail, one of the leading email marketing companies. A two-time book author, a patent holder and a frequent speaker, Jordan has more than 20 years of experience in direct and database marketing.
Read more.
Nicholas Einstein is director of strategic and analytic services at
Datran Media. Specializing in email and CRM strategy, he helps some of America’s top brands leverage online channels to communicate more effectively with their customers and prospects.
Lisa Harmon is a principal at
Smith-Harmon, a creative services consultancy dedicated to email marketing strategy and production. She works with marketers to increase clickthrough, maximize revenue, and infuse delight into their email creative. Lisa is also the blogger behind
edm.smith-harmon.com, an ongoing commentary on the best (and worst!) in email marketing creative.
Read more.
Chip House is
ExactTarget's VP of marketing services, leading the teams responsible for client success. He was named to BtoB Magazine’s 2005 “Who’s Who in B-To-B,” for being a vocal proponent of legitimate commercial email and an active lobbyist regarding spam and privacy issues.
Read more.
Marco Marini is the CEO of ClickMail Marketing (CMM) and an acknowledged expert in e-marketing with over a decade and half's-worth of experience in the field. Before taking over as CEO, he was CMM's VP of Marketing & Operations. Marini has also held key marketing positions with CyberSource, eHealthInsurance, DoveBid and IBM Canada.
Stephanie Miller is VP of strategic services for
Return Path, the leading email performance company. She works with marketers to earn a higher ROI and response from their acquisition and retention email programs—developing content, contact and segmentation strategies, along with testing, measurement and production programs.
Read more.
Erick Mott is communications director at email service provider Lyris. He has 20 years of experience from enterprise, SMB, agency and start-up marketing, communications and innovation roles at companies including Habeas, Nokia, MarkMonitor, GlobalFluency, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Philips Electronics and two of his own start-ups.
Read more.
Jeanniey Mullen is the Email Experience Council's founder and the global EVP and CMO of global online publishing company
Zinio. She is a thought leader and visionary in the email and digital marketing field. A columnist for ClickZ, she has published numerous papers and is a frequent speaker.
Read more.
Kevin Senne is the Strategic Deliverability Director for Premiere Global Services. Kevin has been heavily involved in all facets of email marketing for more than a decade and he previously managed Email Operations for Travelocity.com. Kevin specializes in deliverability, strategy, and social media integratio and he focuses on helping marketers become permission-based one-to-one marketers.
Read more.
Charles Stiles is the VP of worldwide business development at
Goodmail Systems. In his role, Charles is focused on helping generate a better understanding of the email environment and potential solutions for a better consumer experience. He currently serves as the chairman for the Messaging Anti-Abuse Work Group.
Read more.
Jeremy Swift is director of client relations for email service provider BlueHornet. He helped form BlueHornet’s founding team in 2000 and has been responsible for client services and marketing strategy since the company’s inception. Jeremy is known for his ability to articulate technical information in ways that clearly resonate with today’s online marketer.
Kara Trivunovic currently serves as the senior director of strategic services for StrongMail Systems, where she is responsible for helping marketers optimize their email marketing programs for greater returns. Most recently Kara was founder and principal of The Email Advisor, a respected email marketing consultancy. Prior to launching The Email Advisor, Kara led strategic services for the email division of Premiere Global Services. Kara brings a unique perspective to the space having worked on the client, agency and provider side for 10 years.
Chris Wheeleris the director of deliverability at Bronto Software. He is leading the charge for ensuring both Bronto's customers and staff are well informed about email marketing practices and technology as well as being the face of Bronto deliverability externally. Previously, Chris created the internal deliverability program at Amazon.com alongside program managing the operations of the email team and was at an ESP leading a team of deliverability consultants. Besides being a frequent contributor on Deliverability.com, Chris is a part of many email industry forums, both business and technical.
Read more.
Chad White is the research director at Smith-Harmon, an email marketing strategy and creative services agency. He is the founder of the
Retail Email Blog, a blog dedicated to tracking the email marketing practices of the largest online retailers. Chad regularly writes major research reports on email marketing and is an Email Insider columnist for MediaPost.
Read more.
recommended blogs
Premiere Global Services
The Retail Email Blog
Bronto Software's Bronto Blog
Return Path
Datran Media's Outperformance Marketing
Goodmail's blog
Smith-Harmon EDM Review
SubscriberMail's Best Practices
The BrightWave Blog
Blue Sky Factory's The Thinking Inbox
Gold Lasso's The From Line
eROI's The Email Wars
eROI's Return on Subscriber
eROI's Email Days
Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey
Bill's Blog
Epsilon Insights
Listrak's Email Marketing Blog
MindComet's Email Marketing Voodoo
Tamara's Email Marketing Best Practices Blog
The Agitator
MailerMailer's The Touch
MediaPost Email Insider blog
With the ubiquity of image disabling, the escalation of mobile email viewing and the expectation that recipients will not scroll, email senders have been hot to hop on the preheader train. For those of you who haven’t yet left the station, the preheader is the usually small and subdued text blurb at the top of an email that includes some combination of the below:
Comments (4)
Preheaders are meant to inform a recipient of:
(1) Who an email is from
(2) What the email is about and what to do about it
(3) How to view it with images
-------------------------------------------------
Of these three items I think that 2 of them are redundant and a waste of valuable preview pane real estate -- 1 and 3. For 1 this was already conveyed in the From field and if you are writing subject lines properly should also be repeated there. Branded subject lines generally boost open rates. For 3 the email client does this for us. In all of the clients I use, each one inserts a line of text or grey bar or link that tells me images have been blocked and to "click here" to view blocked images.
2 is the truly valuable message to put in a preheader. I have seen a significant boost in click through and conversions with my clients that have used this tactic. This also helps with the mobile audience since it is the first text we will see on our tiny screens (I am a mobile audience member). The links in the preheader are less useful for this audience though since BlackBerries do not render hyperlinks, but this text is still much more readable than HTML on a BlackBerry.
Posted by Ian McCollum | January 24, 2008 5:17 PM
Posted on January 24, 2008 17:17
Ian, great input. I agree on the mobile piece doubly; I see 2 lines of preheader in my iPhone Mail Inbox, directly under the subject line.
Posted by Lisa Harmon | January 25, 2008 1:22 PM
Posted on January 25, 2008 13:22
Lisa -
Great stuff! First of all...I love the term "preheader." I hope you're working on trademarking that...
I agree with Ian's comments above. I've worked with several clients to put "calls to action" (CTAs) in the preheader and their click-through / conversion rates have shot through the roof. It shocks me that nobody is really using this tactic. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
dj at bronto
Posted by DJ Waldow | January 30, 2008 9:00 AM
Posted on January 30, 2008 09:00
I have employed this strategy since October, and the "preheader" teaser is always the top clicked link in our mailings.
I strive to keep this valuable (top 300px) real estate clutter free and limit it to: Click to View link, Subscription/Opt Out Options link, CTA teaser & link.
This has improved Open and CT rates and helped us to reach our mobile audience much more effectively.
I look forward to seeing more companies employ this tactic.
Greta @ PlanetOut Inc.
Posted by Greta Carey | January 7, 2009 2:22 PM
Posted on January 7, 2009 14:22