Pre-header text - friend or foe?

In the dim and recent past when bandwidth and storage were huge issues - especially for corporate IT teams - there was a benefit to offering a "browser version” of an email.

If your webmaster was blocking or choking images in your inbox, then choosing the web option would enable you to see those images - and all that lovely, explanatory, money-generating text “displayed" within them. However, storage is cheaper now and broadband / WiFi far more widely available.

So, providing you’ve made sure you have images switched on!, if those images aren't loading for you (due to weak local signal, you picked that "sort of looked legit" free WiFi option in a bar, or BT Openzone enticed your smartphone down a local rabbit-hole) then the web version won’t be any more accessible than the version already displayed in your inbox. This is an eCRM game changer, enabling marketers to stop giving up key inbox real estate to negative copy such as “no images?”, “can’t see anything” or “Hello…unsubscribe here” and, instead, use this pre-header text to entice the reader in. Yet, many companies still “waste” pre-header space on negative messaging. I'd love to hear from anyone with strong views supporting their retention. Whether that's for particular audience segment(s), regulated industry or another reason. Especially if you’ve conducted a head-to-head test THIS YEAR, as THE CRM agency is about to conduct a suite of these tests for a client.

We're going to be having lots of these debates over at THE CRM agency's LinkedIn company page too.

Please follow us there to be notified and join the debate.