Insurance agency owners, managers and marketers should take advantage of preview copy for all of their email campaigns. If you’re unfamiliar with preview text and its role in insurance email marketing campaigns, keep reading:

What is preview text?

It is the piece of text below (or next to) an email subject line in the email client’s inbox. It provides additional details about the subject of the email and improves the appearance of the delivered email, which translates to the overall professionalism of the message and campaign. Proper use of preview text prevents distorted or unrecognizable text below the email subject line.

Who uses it?

All major email clients now support this feature, including Outlook, Gmail, and Apple Mail. Gmail refers to this as Snippets, Apple Mail calls it a preview, and in Outlook it’s Message Preview.

What happens when you don’t use it correctly?

As shown below, the preview text displays the name of an image instead of information that would be useful to the reader, affecting the professionalism and experience of the campaign. Graphic-rich emails or emails that start with an image often cause problems.

• Example of bad text: //img.rt2546?ca.98239841349230491=999

• Example of Proper Text: New Industry Compliance Webinar Available

Insurance agency marketers must review every message, especially graphic-rich emails, to make sure the preview text is correct. Considering the challenge of receiving your email, getting past spam filters, and avoiding mass email tagging or boolean poisoning issues with your message, it’s important to ensure that all of your email campaigns use the text of preview correctly.

Additional tips

Here are some additional tips to help you. It’s better to customize the preview text to complement the subject line, rather than repeat the subject line. For example, suppose your subject line is:

• Webinar – Industry Compliance Rules, Regulations and Recent Changes

Don’t repeat the subject line. Complement your subject line with different, relevant and useful details. For example:

• Join us tomorrow for this important webinar

Also, insurance agency marketers should try to keep the copy short and to the point. Although email client views can vary dramatically, try to keep your text to 35-40 characters. This should allow all or most of your recipients to read it in its entirety. Longer text will be truncated, as will a long subject line when viewed by your prospects and customers. That being said, for more complicated messages, you can use more characters, but try to make sure that the gist of your message is contained within the first 40 characters. Your mantra should be short, succinct, and punchy.