Email Best Practices:
Including a Preheader
A preheader (also referred to as a “Johnson Box”) is the short blurb of text that appears after the subject line when an email campaign is viewed in an inbox environment. This text further elaborates on the subject line affording you a great opportunity to entice your subscribers to read on.
Many email clients auto-generate this preheader text comprised of the first few lines of text, or ALT text in some cases, found in your campaign. Including a preheader in your template ensures that you will have full control of your preheader text in email environments. Otherwise, subscribers may see undesirable text such as the ALT text for your logo or header imagery followed by your campaign text, archive link, or social media icon information.
ALT text in email
Most email clients block images by default. In some cases, instead of showing the image, the email client will instead display the ALT text. This is definitely handy, especially in cases where an email design is predominantly composed of images. The ALT text can help communicate the message even if the images cannot. Alternatively, in a situation where images can’t or won’t load due to a bad connection, broken link, etc., the ALT text will appear instead of the image. [Litmus]
Including A Preheader
We make it easy, and painless, to include a custom preheader in your email campaigns. Each of our custom email templates comes complete with a customizable preheader section at no additional charge. Simply click and edit as you normally would within the Mailchimp editor.
Preheader Examples
Below are a few examples of preheader text. Notice how the campaign preview text is generated from the first few lines of text found in the campaigns.
Preheader text as shown in email inbox.
Preheader text as shown in email campaign.
Preheader text as shown in email inbox.
Preheader text as shown in email campaign.
Preheader text continued as shown in email campaign.
Preheader text as shown in email inbox.
Preheader text as shown in email campaign.
Preheader text continued as shown in email campaign.
Preheader Automation
With Mailchimp preheaders aren’t just a great way to emphasize your campaign content and increase open rates, they’re also a great place to introduce automation and personalization.
Personalize your campaign preheaders with Mailchimp’s merge tags which pull subscriber data straight from your Mailchimp list into your campaign content.
Incorporate a table of contents tag into your preheader and auto-generate your preheader content for quick and easy content creation.
