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Using the Preview Pane Correctly

Nov 14 2008

So often we talk about making sure that we design for the preview pane. Make your actions clear, your creative work, your buttons pop, etc. But what happens when you do it and it works out right, and you don’t follow the above ideas? Well it works out a genius in this case. 

What I loved about this email was that it gave just enough to make me want to open it and see more. I have attached the preview in my email client to first show you what I saw. They below you will see what I saw after I opened it all the way. What makes this so powerful in the preview pane was the FREE part. I had no clue what I was in for for free, but it made me want to know more. WIN. 

The idea behind designing for the preview pane is to make people want to know and read more. Even if it falls out of line with the idea of giving them the actions first, it gives you a little mystery that makes it work for me. And I assume others as well. 

When you open it up you get the full deal and notion of what the FREE is all about. But was it worth it? Well one part of me says yes. It made me interested to see what it was all about. The other side wants to say FAIL on best practices. But who sets the results for best practices? It is not you, but the recipient on what they do with it once they get it. So a little tease is a win if you can pull it off right and it performs. There is not a magic bullet out there. You need to experiment and I can tell you from watching what they have been doing lately that they get it and I can assume that the tests that they are running this quarter are gaining some wins. 

What are you doing to try new ideas? If you aren’t testing, you aren’t trying. And if you aren’t trying you are not learning what will take your email campaigns to the next level of success.


Published in Behavioral Marketing, Best Of Email, Best Practices, E-Mail Marketing, Email Design, New Marketing Ideas

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3 Responses

  1. 1
    Tim says:
    November 14th, 2008 at 9:38 am

    I think it is difficult to design based on the fold unless you are segmenting based on domain.

    In Yahoo, this would have worked great. However, in Gmail and AOL there would have been no teaser effect because of the larger preview.

    As a matter of fact, with the poor pretext header, I probably wouldn’t have even opened in in Gmail or AOL… or Outlook.


  2. 2
    Kelly Lorenz says:
    November 14th, 2008 at 9:40 am

    I have to respectfully disagree with you on this one for two (and a half) reasons:

    1. The subject line already gives the tease away, the actual email just reiterates the message.

    2. If you have a shorter preview pane, all you’ll see is red bubbles, losing the call to action, which is a FAIL. This could have been avoided by including a preheader call to action or a button at the top of the body of the message.

    Also, the green is a little bit off-putting. Why so green? Why wouldn’t they just a deeper green to go with the holiday red of the message?

    -Kelly Lorenz


  3. 3
    Glenn says:
    November 15th, 2008 at 8:51 am

    I think designing to the preview pane is extremely difficult and subjective. Like Tim says above, the Gmail and AOL preview panes are different. The MS Outlook app pane is totally customizable as people can reduce and increase the size of the pane, as well as exclude it altogether. And are there any stats out there as to how many people open Outlook emails using Outlook Web access? When viewing in “Two-Line View” my preview pane is on the right-hand side and is vertical. So I’d see 100% of the email creative.

    Segmenting based on domain is an interesting idea but wondering if the ROI is really going to be there in the end.