Insurance agency owners, principals and marketers should be taking advantage of preview text for all their email campaigns. If you are unfamiliar with preview text and its role with insurance email marketing campaigns, read on:
What is preview text?
It is the text snippet below (or next to) an email subject line in the email client inbox. It provides additional detail into the subject matter of the email and improves the look and feel of the delivered email, which translates into the overall professionalism of the message and campaign. Correct use of preview text prevents garbled or unrecognizable text under your email subject line.
Who uses it?
All major email clients now support this feature, including Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail. Gmail refers to this as Snippets, Apple Mail calls it a preview, and in Outlook it’s a Message Preview.
What happens when you don’t use it correctly?
As show below, the preview text is pulling an image name as opposed to information that would be helpful to the reader, thus impacting campaign professionalism and expertise. Graphically rich emails, or emails that begin with an image often cause problems.
- Incorrect Text Example: //img.rt2546?ca.98239841349230491=999
- Proper Text Example: New Webinar Available on Industry Compliance
Insurance agency marketers should review each message, especially with graphically rich emails, to ensure their preview text is correct. Considering the challenge in getting your email delivered, getting past spam filters, and preventing bulk email labeling or Boolean poisoning issues with your message, it’s important to make sure all your email campaigns are using preview text properly.
Additional tips
Here are a few additional tips to help you. It’s best to customize the preview text to compliment the subject line, as opposed to repeating the subject line. For example, let’s say your subject line is:
- Webinar – Industry Compliance Rules, Regulations & Recent Changes
Don’t repeat the subject line. Compliment your subject line with different, relevant, and helpful detail. For example:
- Join us tomorrow for this important webinar
Also, insurance agency marketers should try to keep your text short and to the point. Though email client views can vary dramatically, try to keep your text between 35-40 characters. This should allow all or most of your recipients to read it in its entirety. Longer text will truncate, just as a long subject line can do when viewed by your prospects and clients. That said, for more complicated messages, you can use more characters, but try to make sure the essence of your message is contained within the first 40 characters. Your mantra should be short, succinct, and impactful.