EP. 40- EMAIL PRE-HEADERS – Avoid this MASSIVE Mistake! l Jay’s Scoop

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. We are back for do this, not that.

And today it's finally time we talk about reheaders. Isn't that going to be exciting? Yes, it is going to be exciting.

You might be listening and say, oh, I already know everything there is to know about pre headers. I'm not going to listen. Don't do that. There's so much to pre headers. There's new information I want to share.

Now, some of you are like, I don't know what a pre header is. What are we talking about?

So let me first break down what a pre header is and then the massive pitfall I want you to avoid and then the opportunity, the new things that you could be doing with pre headers to absolutely crush your email marketing performance. First off, what is a pre header? A pre header goes by different names. Some people call it the second subject line.

Some people call it the preview text. Essentially what it is, it's that, like, gray line of text that shows up underneath the subject line before you open up an email.

They call it the second subject line because it's the thing you get to read right after the subject line before you open up an email and you say, should I open it up and should I not? So in the world of email, you have your from address Crazy valuable real estate subject line. Crazy valuable real estate.

And then the third piece of the crazy valuable real estate is the pre header, because this is one of the pieces that decides whether or not you're going to open up the email or not. So what you do in that pre header is so, so, so important.

Before we get into what you should be doing in the pre header, I want to talk about something you should not be doing in the pre header. This is a mistake that about 30% of marketers make and they don't realize they're making it.

And I'm not going to throw anybody under the bus here, but I'm going to tell you right now, some of the biggest marketers on the planet make this mistake. They don't realize it. I'm going to tell you why they don't realize it and what it's doing to their campaigns.

So when you set up your email campaign, you're using whatever platform you're using, all right?

And when you go ahead and you want to put your pre header in there and set it all up using this platform, and whoever designing your email might be moving things around, graphics around in the message that you're going to send out, using what's called a spacer gif. Not to get technical, but they want to make sure that the layout of your email looks a certain way.

So they're using all this technical stuff to move around images and all this mumbo jumbo. Or maybe using a design platform that does it for you. Doesn't matter.

When you go ahead and you send yourself, you set up your email, you have your pre header, your subject line, all of it. You send yourself a test message before you send out. Like, oh, I want to see what it's going to look like before I hit send. We all do that, right?

So when you send yourself a test message, where do you send it? You send it to yourself on your desktop. You send yourself a test message, you open it up and it looks fine, and you hit send.

Here's the massive pitfall to avoid that so many marketers are not aware of.

When you send yourself a test message and you look at it on your mobile device, on your phone, it looks different than it looks on your desktop or your laptop or whatever. So your phone test message looks different. Right?

But especially for your pre header, because the reason I was telling you before that sometimes you're on your design platform, your designer will do certain things to move around images and whatnot.

A lot of times, about 30% of the time, when they move around these images and things, the Pre header that you wrote gets pushed to the back, to the side or down. And the code for those invisible images will show up in the Pre header by accident.

Have you ever gotten an email and the Pre header text looks like code? It looks like a mess. That's because the pre header got pushed off to the side.

And the problem is when you send yourself a test message, you don't see this mistake on your desktop. It doesn't show up. It only shows up if you look at your test message on your phone.

So if you don't look at your test message on your phone, you won't see that issue. Now, the reason that a lot of people make this mistake is they're only looking at their test messages on their desktop. All right?

Now, why does this even matter? Well, first off, the overwhelming majority of people, the first time they Open up an email is on their phone.

It's about 70% of people open up their email on their phone. So what it looks like on your phone is critical.

But what happens is when this code shows up in the pre header, as opposed to what you wrote, the recipient thinks that it might be spam. They're like, there's no way this mega brand, which by the way, a lot of mega brands make this mistake.

There's no way this mega brand is sending me something with this code in the pre header. This must be fake, this must be spam, this must be spyware. And they immediately delete it. And they don't open it.

And you, the marketer, you don't even realize it's happening. Because when you look at your desktop, it's all fine. And sometimes you're using rendering software.

You might be using these tools to render your email before you send them out. But a lot of time, these rendering tools, they're not showing you the issue either.

So what I'm telling you is make sure that when you send yourself a test message, you look at it on your phone before you hit send. Because about 30% of all marketers send out their messages with this code showing up the pre header.

And it's not just not leveraging this super valuable real estate, it's holding back your performance because it looks like garbage. It doesn't even look like something that a professional organization would send out. So that's a major pitfall to avoid.

Now let's talk about the opportunity that is the Pre header. What you put in the pre header really can change the percentage of people opening up your email.

The first thing you should never put in your pre header is what I call a format issue information. If the first line, your pre header says, if you're having trouble viewing this, blah, blah, blah, don't do that. Nobody's even opened your email yet.

Nobody knows if they have trouble viewing it because I haven't opened it yet, by the way. Your pre header can go for about 85 characters, but really the first 40 or 50 characters are what matter.

The first line of your pre header should be something related to the offer. It doesn't matter what it is. You're promoting a webinar, you're promoting a sale. I don't care what you're doing, it's an extension of that offer.

That's what you want to put in the pre header. The thing that is working the best right now in the Pre header is what we're calling continuation pre headers.

In the pre header you write plus, free shipping on all the orders. Plus.

So when you have continuation pre headers generally start with one of these three words and but or plus when you have them to start your pre header, we see overall email open rates go up by about 15% just by starting your pre header with and, but or plus. All right, so what you're putting in the pre header is really important. You can put an emoji in the pre header. It does really, really well.

You want to start the pre header with an emoji. So if you don't want to use an emoji in the subject line, try putting the pre header. It works incredibly well.

Another really strange test that is working well because every marketer uses the Pre header now for offer related information is actually sending out emails with no pre header at all. No pre header at all.

I'm not saying you do this all the time, but if you've never tested not having any pre header, it actually will stand out in somebody's inbox. And just in the limited testing that we're seeing out there, it's lifting open rates by almost 20% when you do a no pre header at all.

But it's not something you want to do every time. Maybe like once every five emails. No pre header at all. Super interesting test.

So pre headers are valuable real estate and they're also where a lot of your campaigns might be going into the garbage because you're not realizing that you're sending out these emails that have this code in the pre header that looks a mess. All right, so before we get into, since you didn't ask, which is the portion of this podcast that just. I don't even know what we talk about.

I don't even know what in my brain. Before we get there, and we're going to get there, I want to share with you. This podcast is exclusively brought to you by my friends at Marigold.

Marigold's cool. I use Marigold. What do I use? Marigold for. I send out a lot of emails. My agency, we send out billions of emails every year and we use Marigold.

Marigold is a great platform for small, medium, large companies. And it's not just email, but their email sending infrastructure is awesome.

They have an incredible loyalty marketing platform, relationship marketing platform. Major brands use them. And you know, if you're in market and you're thinking about a new platform, you need to consider Marigold.

Check them out@meet marigold.com that is meet marigold.com strongly recommend. They're awesome. All right, let's get on to. Since you didn't ask, I've come to the conclusion almost everything drives me bananas.

I don't know why that is. So I was at the supermarket. In my supermarket, they have a self checkout.

And every time I go by the self checkout, I always think, oh, this is going to go great. And every, every time I go to the self checkout, it goes sideways.

I have never gotten through a self checkout without needing the assistance of a human being. It's totally opposite of what's supposed to happen. So here's what it just happened to be that go to self checkout. And I was given a grocery list.

My wife gave me, let's get all this stuff, okay? And I'm clueless. Like, it. I really don't know the difference between like a, like a peach and like a nectarine and like the vegetables.

I mean, parsley versus like scallions. I mean, it is like, forget it. I have no ability to under. I have no capacity to know what these things are by sight.

I always ask people, where's a scallion? What does that look like? Because I have no brain. Anyway, so I go to self checkout.

And the problem with self checkout, I feel like I'm like in high school. Because in order, yes, I could scan. I could scan some of the barcode. Like if I have to scan, like soda. Okay, scan. Okay, fine.

But when you have to scan the vegetable, what it does? At least where I go, it goes, what is this? It says, what are you scanning? What are you putting on the thing? What is the name of the thing?

And I don't know the name of the thing. And like, so it was a scallion. So I had to call the lady over and I go, excuse me, hi. She goes, what's the problem? I go, I don't know what this is.

What is it? What am I holding? What am I actually holding? Because what are you talking?

I go, I need to tell the machine what I'm holding so I can buy the thing because that's a scallion. I go, okay. Next thing comes up and I have no what is parsley? Why am I even buying parsley?

And so it becomes this extreme embarrassment that I don't know anything is this woman was like, she was mortified for me, for my existence because she's like, you don't know what you're doing. And I'm like, I'm never doing. And I know I'm going to wind up back at self checkout very soon, embarrassing myself. It takes way longer.

So this is what's on my mind. Anyway, so today, what did we learn? Three headers are very important. I don't know what a scallion looks like at all.

And go to jschwetelson.com and I don't drop me a note there. Let's hang out. Let's talk. Hopefully you enjoy this podcast. I don't know, give it a five star review or. Or something. Let's do something.

Thanks for being here. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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