Jan192011
Jan192011
Chris Brogan suggested in an article on Open Forum that among the improvements you can make in your email marketing this year, you can move that silly link that’s always at the top to view the email in a browser to the bottom of your email and spare that space from doing your email housekeeping. Instead, you can use that to communicate something of actual value to your recipient. I like this idea, but recently, I noticed another reason to like it: my gmail email list.
Gmail (like other email clients would) gives me the sender, the subject line, and then the first few words of the email in the email list view. When you see what the first few words are when you put “Click here to view in your browser” at the top, you really begin to understand how much this sucks. And some intros are worse than others. Here are just a few examples of the preview text I see in my email list view:
The problem with these is not only that they waste a perfectly good opportunity to get a click, but many of them use negative words that could make a person not want to click. I don’t want to open an email that upon first glance is telling me something about “Having trouble.” Chanel, moreover, should know better than to be using all caps. I find it immediately obnoxious to look at and want to open that email even less.
Think about everything that goes into your open rates. Because you can’t get click-throughs without opens. And if that’s not what you want, then why are you stuffing inboxes to begin with?
