Ask Us ANYTHING❓Email Pre-Header Tips and Tricks! ➕ Paris Hilton vs. Jason Bateman? | Ep. 320

0:08Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins, and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's do this, not that.

0:40we are back for ask us anything from the do this not that podcast presented by marigold this is our short episode we're all week long we get in questions we get in work questions we get in ridiculous questions we try to tackle one of each and if you want to submit a question uh you would be the coolest person on earth all you got to do is go to jay schwettleson dot com there's a button that says podcast another one that says ask us anything and that's where we get our questions and we love it. So let's do our work question first. We got a question from Dave from Rochester, New York. Uh, well, I don't know.

1:13Is it cold? Wait a minute. What time of year is it? Oh no, it's not cold there right now. Better not be. It seems like it's always cold in Rochester, but anyway, Dave, what is going on? What's on your mind? Jay, we had a discussion internally about pre headers and migrating to having them be about the offer as opposed to it saying, if you're having trouble viewing here, click this link. Do preheaders even matter in email marketing? Well, first of all, let's talk about what a preheader is and they matter a big deal. And I'm going to give you some tips right now for your preheader that can actually significantly increase the percentage of people opening up your emails.

1:53Now, the preheader is that second subject line. It's that kind of grayed out subject line that's below the regular subject line. And first off, if you are still doing the, if you can't view this, click this, or if you're having issues viewing this, do this, and that's what you're putting in your preheader, that's ridiculous. That's from 1985. Don't do that. Your preheader is very, very valuable real estate. And it is one of the deciding factors of why somebody is or is not opening up one of your emails. Okay. So, so that preheader, it doesn't matter what platform you use, everything I'm about to tell you, you can put in that preheader and you should be, and you should be testing it all the time.

2:40Now, people ask, well, how many words or how many characters can I put in my preheader? Really the max size is about 85 characters, but that's kind of irrelevant. What's relevant is what's in the first few characters, the first few words of your preheader. And what you want to think about first off is that it's kind of a continuation of the subject line. The way that people view emails, they look at the from name, they look at part of the subject line, and then they look at part of the preheader, the start of the preheader. And the first word or the first words that you put in your preheader can have a huge impact on whether or not somebody opens up your email.

3:15There are actually three magic words. The word and, the word but, and the word plus. If you start your preheader with and, but, or plus, we actually see open rates on your emails. The percentage of people opening up your emails go up by over 10%. What does that even mean? They're basically continuation words. They're words that when you're reading the subject line and then your eyes go to the preheader, If it says the word and, but, or plus, it's pulling the person in via their subconscious to having them continue on reading. So if your offer was something like 25 % off the latest fashions, that's your subject line, and then the preheader said, and this special bonus discount, right?

4:01Or if it said, if your subject line said, three HR tips that you need to know, and then the preheader said, but there's something you got to check out first. So and, but, and plus at the start of your preheader are key. The thing though that you want to do is you want to capitalize the entire word. So A-N-D or B-U-T or P-L-U-S, all the letters in that one word are capitalized because it stands out just a little bit and that's really, really important. An area that marketers, basically if you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer that we're not tapping into enough in the preheader is using emojis.

4:41I don't care what platform you're on. You can put emojis in your preheader and it crushes it. In some cases, emojis in your preheader actually do better than putting emojis in your subject line. If you've never tested putting emojis in preheader, you absolutely need to be doing this. And I don't care how boring of an industry you're in. A lot of times business to business marketers think that they're in a boring industry and they can't use emojis. You don't need to use a smiley face. You don't need to use a green vomit face. You can use a check mark. You can use a calendar emoji. It stands out.

5:13And the secret sauce in the preheader, okay, is using bookend emojis. When you start your preheader and end your preheader with the same emoji, let's say it's a calendar emoji. Okay. When you use bookend emojis, it actually lifts your email open rates for both business and consumer marketers by about 15 % because it stands out in the inbox big time. Now, the other thing that nobody is talking about is this idea of white space, meaning that forget about whatever words you're going to write in the preheader. Even forget about whatever words you're writing in the subject line. Visually, when something has a lot of white space, the email that has that white space stands out.

5:52And I'm not going to tell you to do this next thing all the time, but once in a while you should try it. And I'd really love to hear how it impacts the percentage of people opening up your emails, which is have no preheader at all. Zero, no preheader, no words, no nothing. Why would that work? It works because visually your email is going to stand out because now over 95 % of all promotional email use preheaders. So that white space in the inbox actually gets your email stand out. So if you've never tried no preheader at all, whether you're a business or a consumer marketer, I strongly recommend it.

6:29The other nonsense that's out there and what you should totally disregard is that people say in the marketing world, well, in the new update to Apple in their iOS 18, in their new mail app, they basically kind of got rid of preheaders. So do preheaders even matter anymore? Listen, less than 10 % of mail app, iPhone mail app users have upgraded and using all the new garbage that's in the Apple mail update. So less than 10 % of just the Apple users have no preheader. And that's only a half of all email users. So you're talking about nobody that impacts nobody. So preheaders still matter in a massive, massive way.

7:11So those are some easy tests in the preheader that I would be thinking about. And so back to the original question, it is critical that you use that preheader real estate is super valuable. All right, let's get into the ridiculous question. So we got a question in from Nancy from Iowa. What's up, Nancy? Question is this. Jay, we saw that you just announced that Nicole Kidman is going to be speaking at your guru conference this year. How did you arrive at Nicole Kidman and what other celebrities were you trying to get? Oh, I love this question. Yeah. So we just announced for upcoming virtual conference, Guru conference, which by the way, that's free.

7:52That's not a commercial. It's free and it's virtual. If you want to register for it, you could do that at guru conference.com and we're going to run out of virtual seats, but back to the question. So Nicole Kidman, how did we arrive at that? So we made a list of all the different celebrities that we would love to have at Guru conference. I'm going to be very real right now. I did not think Nicole Kidman would say yes. I just didn't because she's such an A-list celebrity. So we're like, we made this list and we had this meeting. It's the funniest meeting ever because we have like our whole team together and everyone's like, well, who would you love to have there?

8:25And who would you love to have there? So one of the celebrities that we're really thinking about was Paris Hilton. I like Paris Hilton. I think that she's underrated. I think she gets a lot of heat or whatever. But the idea that we had was the theme of this year's Guru Conference is 90s versus 2000s, like the decades. And it was like, we got to get Paris Hilton because Simple Life. And by the way, if you've never watched the original Simple Life show, that's an incredible show. But I was focused on if we were going to get Paris Hilton, I also wanted Nicole Richie. I wanted them both together. And that was just hard to pull off.

8:59It just was, it became too complicated. So then the other people on the list, we had a very short list. I don't know what we were thinking. We had The Rock was on the list. Okay. And by the way, last year we had Sarah Jessica Parker. The year before that we had Martha Stewart. So we were like, maybe we can get something big. So we had The Rock. We had Jason Bateman, which I thought would have been very, very cool. We had Nicole Kidman. And that was pretty much our list. We couldn't get a hold of The Rock. Try as we will. We tried to get The Rock. We couldn't track him down. And Jason Bateman was totally unavailable.

9:37But I think that that dude, by the way, is, I mean, he's underrated funny. He really is. If you've never listened to his podcast, smart list. I love that podcast. That makes me laugh. That part of the beginning of the podcast makes me laugh the rest of it, whatever. And then Sean Hastings is on there. We actually thought about getting Sean Hastings. Who's the guy from, um, willing grace. He's hilarious. Um, but we were like, maybe we can go in bigger. So then Nicole Kidman, and we're like, there is no way that we're going to be able to get Nicole Kim, but you know what? She was like, yeah, I'm in.

10:08I'm like, this is amazing. We were, I almost fell over. I was so excited. Um, so yeah, we, we were kicking around all sorts of different celebrities that we could try to get. Um, and they're hard. I mean, it's hard to just get ahold of these people. So we're super stoked about all of that. I don't know what we're talking about. Great question. Listen, thanks for checking out the show. Uh, I don't know, Leave it a review, change your preheader, and later.

11:02guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com. Check it out.