The subject line. An invitation to your email. The enticing factor for a contact to open in the first place. But what if you can add a sneak preview into the mix. Adding an extra factor to inform your recipient of the content of your emails. How helpful would an extra 50 characters be for getting your email opened and read?
So, how can you achieve this? It’s all with a super subject line. But first, what is it? The super subject line, aka preheader, is an additional line of text which appears below the subject line and sender information. If it’s not included, this area will be filled by the first line of text in the email. So, this could be relevant, or it could be a string of characters which really doesn’t convey anything useful at all.
Now to weigh up whether its good to use, or should be avoided.
Yay
The super subject line is the first thing people will see in an email, after the subject line of course. Having it defined gives you an extra 40-80 characters to work with to convey the content of your email. You can add in that information which didn’t fit in the subject line. An extra succinct summary of what to expect when they open your email.
Super subject lines also serve the purpose of making the email more relevant to the recipient. In turn, this makes the email more believable. It won’t look or feel like a mass email, there will be no random HTML or text pulled in which happened to be the first thing in the code. So, you can avoid always having ‘View Online Unsubscribe’ as your opening impression. The entire feel of your email will be more streamlined.
Plus, you can hide the preheader from appearing in your actual email by adding a handy bit of code behind the scenes. (See the code needed in our Email Optimisation Guide)
Nay
The downside to super subject lines is twofold. Mainly because of how the pesky Email Service Providers (ESPs) display them. Firstly, some just don’t. Certain ESPs simply won’t show super subject lines at all. Although, this shouldn’t necessarily be seen as an issue. Your subject line should still be the initial focus of your email and should convey enough to get your email opened. The preheader was just extra text to boost this likelihood, but it shouldn’t include any extra information which isn’t somewhere else in your subject line or email.
Secondly, super subject lines can be disabled if so desired. Again, this means that the information in your super subject line should also be included elsewhere in your email. Don’t rely on your super subject line for an open.
Us at CommuniGator, think that super subject lines are a great way of adding extra information to convey your email’s content. Our advice: don’t repeat the subject line. Instead, use this extra text to add some useful information about what you’re about to discuss. And be creative with it. Show your recipient what your companies about in the tone of your subject and super subject lines.