One of the revelations from the most recent Marketing Sherpa report on email marketing is how the preview pane has become a dominant force in the way people read their emails.

In fact, after people look at the “from” line and the subject line, their next stop before they decide whether to open the email is increasingly the preview pane.

While it’s long been a factor when you’re sending mail to the corporate world, more than 50% of consumers are now using a preview pane for their home mail as well.

Of those, 76% of people use a horizontal preview pane (across the bottom)–with half of those using the default small pane. So this has BIG implications for email design–especially graphics.

Those huge ezine headers may not be a good idea anymore. For one, many internet hosts (including Yahoo and Gmail) and email programs have turned off automatic image download.

So unless your reader has figured out how to change that, all they probably see is an empty box that says “Right-click here to download pictures…” or a small red “x.” Obviously, neither is going to get them excited about reading your email.

But it also means you should…

• Move any administrative copy or logos to the bottom of the email.
• Consider putting your call to action in the top left corner so it shows up in both types of preview panes. If you need some copy for it, use a short headline and bullets.
• Place a “boring” table of contents (plain text with just a hyperlink) above your designed newsletter template so at least they can see why they may want to open it.
• Include an ALT-text tag on graphics you do use. Apparently that may help it avoid the dreaded red x.

And of course, you should definitely test your own emails in various preview pane settings to see what your readers are seeing.

How to Check Your Emails in MS Outlook

If you’re an Outlook user, here’s how to do it:

Click on the email in the main part of your inbox. Then…

1. Click on “View” then “Reading Pane” then “Bottom” to see the horizontal pane
2. Click on “View” then “Reading Pane” then “Right” to see the vertical one. (You may also want to try it with and without the To-Do bar if you’re an Outlook 2007 user.)

If you’re seeing pictures:

1. Click on “Tools” then “Options”
2. Go to the Security tab and click on “Change Automatic Download Settings”
3. Check box for “Don’t download pictures or other content automatically in HTML e-mail”
4. Click OK

I’m testing a few changes with my ezine after reading the report. Let me know if you do too and how it turns out.

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