Picture it.
You walk into a lovely store, and the first thing the salesperson says to greet you is, “Good morning! What would you like to return today?”
The next person who walks in behind you gets, “Hi there! If you didn’t mean to come into this store, the exit is just over there where you came in.”
How quickly would you make for that exit?
I hate to tell you this – you may want to sit down for it – you could be doing this very thing right now. You could be greeting your raving fans with a cheerful, “Hello! There’s the door!” without even realizing it. I know, because I was doing it, myself! (And you know I will always give you the benefit of my experience!) Thanks goes to Charlie Wiesel from Sabyl’s Fine Jewelry and PeninsulaAgency.com for pointing out to us.
We recently changed the RETAILMavens email format, and when we did, we neglected to fix one ever-important detail. Our emails, when seen in email inboxes around the globe, looked like this.
Good golly, what a whoops!
As you so graciously invited me into your inbox, I was showing you the door!
Instead of a little preview of what great things were inside the email, you saw me presupposing you’d have trouble reading it. Even worse, when your preview text tells your raving fans how to unsubscribe!
Since every email you send out to your fans is a GIFT to them, use these little previews to “tease” the content or provide some context to your wonderful and carefully chosen subject line. Make sure your instructions for viewing the email in a browser or unsubscribing are not sneaking their way into your preview, and if your email program allows it, think about that preview with the same care you take with your subject. Here’s how to change it if this is happening to you!
The fixes are actually quite simple, no matter what email marketing system you use. The KEY is to make sure that your first lines of text are catching and pertinent to your article.
Fix 1 – The first readable text in your email should be an article title or catching opening sentence.
Fix 2 – Make sure you put Snippets like “Having Trouble Reading this Email” at the End of your article. You do not want them to show at the top link in the image below. This will show up as the first line in the email preview. You can drag this box to the bottom of your email.
Fix 3 — If you put a date at the top of your email, like a date for Ezines, but sure it is an image so that it does not get pulled into the preview. Making a date an image may take a little more work, but it is well worth the time to make the most of the small space allotted to preview text.
Fix 4 – Keep your greeting to just a first name. Remember, the preview real estate is slim and you need every character you can to be used for content to get them to click on your email.
