One Very Simple Email Marketing Trick that Even Big Brands Aren’t Using

Last week, I was in Vegas for MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit – a high-profile conference aimed at businesses looking to improve their email marketing.

While some of the advice was definitely aimed at big brands with big audiences, there were plenty of tips that apply to anyone with an email list.

I wrote about what I learned in a post for Zen Optimise (Twelve Brilliantly Simple Email Marketing Tips from MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit 2014), but I wanted to share just one very simple yet really vital tip here:

Make your “snippet” text compelling.

What’s snippet text?

It’s the first few words of your email, which appear alongside the subject line in many email clients, like Gmail. I’ve indicated the snippets in red below:

Here are the snippets themselves:

South by Southwest’s email snippet reads “Having trouble reading this email? View it in your browser. Faceboo…”

genConnect’s email snipped reads “If you’re having trouble viewing this email…”

This is such a wasted opportunity. Why not use the snippet to encourage people to open your email? The myWaitrose email does the best job of this, with:

“Waitrose £5 wines plus how to make Delia’s pancakes…”

(And I don’t know about you, but the words “having trouble reading this email?” or similar aren’t exactly encouraging ones…)

There are plenty of ways to create better snippet text. Maybe your template has a box to include a sentence or two on the top left hand side. Maybe you want to change the way you begin your emails.

It’s up to you. Just be aware of what readers are seeing … and how you can use it to your advantage.

Have you got a great example of a compelling snippet from an email in your inbox? Share it with us in the comments!

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