How do you get recipients to open your email marketing campaigns? Are they adding you to their ‘safe’ senders list?
Andy Thorpe, one of Pure360’s email experts, provides his insight and gives us a quick guide to using ‘Trust Earning Text’.
Did You Know?
Anyone who has opened an email in at least the last two years knows that due to those nasty spammers, all images are blocked unless your address is on a safe list.
Anyone who uses the preview pane knows that if the email has a big image at the top it looks appalling in the preview pane before the images are loaded.
Anyone who has a Yahoo or Gmail email address knows that the top couple of lines of your html can get dropped into your inbox next to and underneath the subject line, this is called the ‘inbox snippet’.
Many of us who create email marketing campaigns have picked up on this and have started to use pre-headers, sometimes just a one liner at the top of the html. All of Pure360’s custom templates have at least the view in a browser link at the top, most will also include who sent the email and some will even say why.
Trust Earning Text
Just over a year ago I coined the phrase “Trust Earning Text”; as well as making it easier for people to see your message with the images loaded by viewing it, the browser tells them why they are getting the email and where you got their information from.
You need to earn the trust of the recipient, for them to load the images or view in a browser, also, ask them to add you to their address to make it easier next time.
Obviously, how far you go with this depends on your relationship with the recipient. If they double opted in for a specific subject from you and they shop with you all the time, you probably have a lot of trust already. If someone didn’t un-tick the 3rd party opt-in box on a sign-up form and got put on your list, you’ll probably have to go to town and stick an unsubscribe link up there too.
WAIT, There Is More!
If you think about it, for those top two lines that double up as the inbox snippet and the first thing a recipient would see in the preview pane while the images are blocked, surely it would be far better as a teaser to add extra weight to the subject line and to really make sure you get engagement from the preview pane.
You use the subject line to grab the attention; sometimes you make it a little novel, sometimes a little cryptic and sometimes very straight forward. You can then elaborate on it in the pre-headers, a tiny contents list, list the headlines of the articles in your email, write a humorous line about why this email is so special.
The world is your oyster – well, just that little bit of it!