subject lines

Using your real estate better: preheaders

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You have your subject line science down — you do an A/B test in the morning and you roll out with the test in the afternoon.  You ask questions to entice someone to open.  You create urgency.  And you are still seeing your open rates going down.

Maybe it’s that right after your subject line, people see “To view this email in your browser, click here” instead something of interest.

Gone are the days where the subject line was all that mattered.  The first lines of your email now matter, because in many email clients, they are shown alongside the subject line.  This verbiage is called the preheader and it’s valuable real estate that many otherwise really strong marketers ignore.  For example, here are my last few emails from Home Depot as I write this:

home depot

If you thought that these were the first emails I ran to open, you would be incorrect.

Not only to preheaders show up in this way, but they also travel with the subject line to show up in the lower-right corners of Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook accounts.  Additionally, the preheader can entice someone to read the email (gasp!), not just open it.

So what do you want to do with this to draw your readers in?  Some ideas:

Keep it relatively short.  Not subject line short, but make sure that it gets your point across in the first 75 characters or so, so mobile email clients will show what you want shown.

Tag team with your subject line.  My best email newsletter open and click performance was on the same email.  (Hey, if you thought we were getting through a post on email pre-headers without me plugging that you can sign up for my free weekly e-newsletter, which gives the story version of the week’s blog posts plus super secret extra benefits, you were sorely mistaken.)

The subject line was “Lead gifts and priming and men, oh my.”  The pre-header was “And the details on how social proof works in direct marketing and the power of hedonic good comparisons, but that made for a really long subject line…”

If you have only 75 characters, you get the gist of what the email is going to be about.  And if you have more, it’s a paired attempt at humor.  This had an 80%+ open rate and 40%+ click-through rate.

Another good tactic here is to ask a question in the subject line that you begin to answer in the pre-header.

Personalize.  A pre-header can start with “Dear Mary,”.  (This, of course, only works if the recipient’s name is Mary.  If it’s Vlad, you may be in trouble.)  Anyway, this pre-header establishes that you know the person’s name.  This, sadly, differentiates it from many other emails that don’t know your name, so it’s more likely to get opened.

Tell them what’s in the tin.  If you have a video in your email that thanks the person for being a supporter, your preheader may not have to be any fancier than something like “Watch a thank-you video from our president.”  If you don’t have content that is worthy of being in the pre-header, rewrite the email.

Make the call-to-action.  Not “Donate now!”  I haven’t tested that as the beginning of a pre-header only because I anticipate it would go down in flames.  But “Today, you can save a life with one minute and two clicks.” does a nice tease of the content as well as creating urgency and timeliness.

So make sure you are testing this valuable real estate.  And when you do get that email from someone who just has their logo’s alt text as the pre-header, forward them this email if you like the organization (and if you don’t, prepare to steal their donors).

Using your real estate better: preheaders

Let’s get small: microseconds

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You haven’t got long.

We’re on to the next email, text, phone call, app.

Literally milliseconds.

What you have to do:

Make the first online images count. People know what they think of a site faster than they blink.  That impression carries over.  It impacts content, action, and donation.

Make the first words count.  Average reading speed is about 140 WPM.  Average subject line is about 7 words? (makes math easy)  Ergo, subject line = 3 seconds.  That is, if you are reading and not skimming.  You are skimming.  So’s your audience.  Be sure to use pre-headers as well.  I’ll talk about those next week.  Subscribe here to get an email when it’s up.

Evoke emotion.  Emotion hits the brain 3000X faster than rational thought.  Reason hasn’t got a chance to set the hook.

Load quickly on mobile.  Only 11% of people expect content to be much slower on their phones.   One additional second = 7% decrease in conversions.  One. Bleedin’.  Second.

Send those thank you’s quickly.  Thank you speed is among the best predictors of retention.  Long-term and short-term.

Don’t wait for your mail testing.  Test to your mail audience online.  Facebook and Google ads = messaging tests.  Subject lines = teaser copy.  It’s not entirely representative.  But it will predict disasters well.

Make the ask.  The act should be in the first three paragraphs of the letter.  They need to know why you are writing.

Flood the zone.  They pitched your letter?  Even after you did outbound voice mail to let them know it’s coming?  You’ll get them in the email.  

Didn’t open the email?  We resend those to people who don’t open.

Still didn’t?  We have ads that follow them around the Web.  Then we’ll call; can’t escape just by going offline.

Multichannel is the way to get in the impressions.  Impressions are the way to get a message through.  Message is the way to get the donation.

Spend time where it counts.  Some donors actually want to read a 12-page letter.  But only if it’s written well.  Not Shakespeare well.  Not James Joyce well.  Da Vinci Code well.  Tom Clancy well.  The kind of letter that forces you to read to find out what’s next .

Sign up for my newsletter.  I won’t waste your time.  Promise.

Let’s get small: microseconds

“Test one variable at a time” is a lie

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It’s not an intentional lie and its heart is in the right place, but it’s wrong nonetheless.

The reason people will tell you to test only one variable at a time is that you want to be able to isolate why what happened happened.  So, for example, if you changed the teaser on an envelope and sent it to an equivalent audience at the same time with the same contents in the envelope, if there was an increased response rate, that is a winning test because of the envelope.

This is a fine way to test if there’s only one thing you want to learn at a time.  You can refine your program this way, getting better and better.  This is the direct marketing equivalent of kaizen – the practice of continual improvement popularized in manufacturing, but now applies to much strategic thinking.

But there are some significant problems with this:

  • You can’t test synergy between variables. Let’s say you have a subject line you’d like to test.  However, it may work better with a different version of your email; after all, you wrote the original subject line for this email – the new one may not fit as well.  Testing one thing at a time may not allow us to test the most coherent versions of each of your offers.
  • It can lead to small ball, where you only test things at the most granular level. In his book Fundraising When Money is Tight, Mal Warwick talks about testing teaser copy 25 different times with almost as many clients.  Of the tests, 21 – 84% — showed no difference (and these were at quantities that would have shown a difference had there been one).  This is an OK learning if you can learn other things from the package as well, but if that’s all you learn, you’ve investing in testing without any return more than four out of five times.
  • It can’t make significant leaps forward. Let’s say you have a control piece in decline.  You know it needs to be replaced because of its response rate.  Or maybe, in a more positive outlook, you’ve accomplished the goal you were striving toward.  Either way, the way to get rid of this piece isn’t to test the envelope one year and the response device the next year – you have to test more than one variable at once.

All in all, this violates a rule you should have for yourself – to learn as much as possible whenever possible.  Think of it as if you were trying to reach the highest elevation on Earth.  If you had the rule of “go up from where you until you can’t go up any more,” you will reach a peak higher than you are currently, but by no means the highest point possible.  Similarly, if you had the rule “climb to the highest point you can see, even if it means going down a bit,” you will be doing better and getting higher than you were, but this iterative process will not lead to you having to don an oxygen tank anytime soon.

So it is with testing.  Testing one variable at a time will get you closer and closer to your local maximum, but not the global maximum.

But the basis of the argument for variable isolation is not untrue.  You still need to be able to figure out what works and what doesn’t.  The trick is sussing out what did what in your test.  That’s what we’ll cover tomorrow: how to layer multiple single tests to get results you can act on.

“Test one variable at a time” is a lie