Roseanne Roseannadanna perhaps says it best: "It just goes to show you, it's always something." Like the legendary character on NBC's "Saturday Night Live," e-mail marketers are accustomed to change. Most of it proves challenging, but some of it can be good. Two such developments appear to be coinciding. The new ubiquity of preview panes may help direct marketers retain customers, despite the looming deadline of altered algorithms that may keep senders of regularly unopened messages out of opt-in recipients' inboxes.
United Kingdom-based InterContinental Hotels Group took a proactive approach to these occurrences. Because the hotel group was already revamping much of its e-mail strategy during the recent consolidation of its e-mail service providers, IHG took a top-to-bottom look at its strategy. It was time to polish what its new ESP terms the "golden rectangle" or the "sweet spot"—that two-inch to three-inch deep message preview pane.
"I know a lot of the research out there, plus even our own research, is something to the tune of 80 [percent to] 90 percent of people use a preview pane," says Kevin Hickey, IHG's global manager of lifecycle and e-mail marketing. "And 60 [percent to] 70 percent of them say they frequently or always use it."
So shortly after starting work on the consolidation in November with its new ESP, Redwood City, Calif.-based e-mail marketing software and services provider StrongMail Systems, IHG tasked Seattle-based e-mail marketing strategy and creative services agency Smith-Harmon, a Responsys company, with redesigning all of IHG's templates to comply with the hotel group's revised e-mail strategy.
"Even if the e-mail's coming from a reputable sender, but nobody's opening up the messages, [the ISPs are] going to start considering, 'Well, people don't like getting messages from this company, and, therefore, we're going to deliver less of it,' " says Aaron Smith, Smith-Harmon's director of creative technologies. "What it's really forcing e-mail marketers to do is make sure that what they send to their subscribers is something that they care about ... They're tweaking the algorithms, but [the ISPs basing e-mail delivery on open rates] really will be going into effect this year."
To that end, here are five tactics for getting recipients to engage with e-mails in their preview panes.
1. Keep preheaders short, in terms of height. The first major lesson IHG learned after having its e-mail templates redesigned was that it was time to take a new look at its preheaders, Hickey says.
This text, often hyperlinked, is directly below the subject line. The preheaders should be considered an extension of the subject line and should only be one or two lines long, says Chris Lovejoy, senior e-mail strategist at StrongMail. "So it would again reinforce that content within your message that you're saying to the recipient is most important," he says. The text also can be a call to action and should be words rather than images due to image suppression defaults.
"It's the first thing that shows up in the e-mail, and it actually has a big impact on mobile platforms, as well," Smith says. "Because for [BlackBerry devices] and some of the older readers that don't render HTML, they'll still see that text right there at the top of the message and the link will be there so they can direct people to the Web site."
2. Use HTML wherever possible, as opposed to graphics. Because of spam blocking systems, image suppression still dominates as the first way recipients see messages, Smith says.
3. Ensure the logo is above the "fold." Smith says the most important elements of an e-mail should remain in the top-left corner. "You've got like 350 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall of space ... that's your primary real estate," he says. While some have their preview panes set vertically, most have them set horizontally, Smith says.
In IHG's case, the templates take into account the different brands—Candlewood Suites, Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Hotel Indigo, InterContinental and Staybridge Suites. But at the same time, Smith says IHG also needs to maintain a core base "from a global marketing perspective." So a common template has different messaging and nuances, based on input from the different property brand managers, he says.
This takes into account the necessary differentiated, relevant editorial aspect of customer interaction, says Smith, who adds that he favors newsletter formats. "There's the need for romance involved," he says. "Don't just hit people over the head with a promotional message."
4. Place the most important message content above the fold. So the preheader, logo and navigation (probably in the preheader) are already placed. Hickey says the "view mobile" prompt helps drive a lot of traffic to the hotel sites.
Now consider the main message content.
If it's a newsletter, consider placing the table of contents above the fold, Smith says. If there's a primary message or a call to action, that should be up top, he adds.
5. Move extraneous information out of the preview pane. "It's really a balancing act of not putting [in] too much content that would, in fact, force the main body of your message further down, or your entire call to action would be suppressed," Lovejoy says.
If all people can see when they click on the message to render it in the preview pane is a tall header, recipients may begin skipping over that sender's messages.
Lovejoy says: "Anything that you can do to get as much information on top of your message will basically help you get ... your message clicked on and read and [taken] out of the preview pane."
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