You will be able to write a subject line and preview text that together tell the reader what is inside and why it matters.
Scroll through your own inbox on your phone and watch how you decide. You see a name, a line of bold text, and a fragment of grey text under it. In about a second you either open, skip, or delete. You do not read the email to decide whether to read the email. Those three things in the inbox view are all you go on, and the same is true for everyone on your list.
This lesson is about two of those three things, the subject line and the preview text, and why they should be written as a pair. The third, the sender name, you set in lesson 4.3: a real person's name your readers recognise.
The preview text is the short line of text that most email apps show after or below the subject line. Together with the sender name and the subject, it makes up everything a reader sees before opening.
If you do not set preview text, the email app fills the space with the first words of your email. Often that is something like "View this email in your browser" or "Having trouble reading this?", which wastes the space. Most email tools have a field for it, sometimes labelled preheader text, next to the subject line, and it is worth filling in on every send.
How much of each line shows depends on the app and the screen, so put the important words first in both.
The subject line should tell the reader what the email gives them. A clever line can work, but a clear one works more often, because readers decide fast and do not stop to decode a pun.
Compare two subject lines for the same issue of Priya's newsletter. "Fractions, and how to stop the panic" is pleasant but vague. "The P5 fraction mistake I mark wrong every week" tells a parent exactly what is inside, and a parent whose child struggles with fractions knows at once that it is for them.
The same goes for Mei Ling. "Exciting news from the kitchen" could mean anything. "Two Saturdays left for December birthday cakes" tells customers what she wants them to know before they even open it.
The course Content and copywriting that people read covers headline patterns in lesson 2.2, Headline patterns that keep working. They apply to subject lines too: the how-to, the specific problem, the outcome, a question the reader would answer yes to, a real number.
Treat the preview text as the second half of the subject line, so it adds a new reason to open instead of saying the same thing twice.
For Priya's email: subject "The P5 fraction mistake I mark wrong every week", preview "It takes ten seconds to spot in your child's working, and here's the fix." The subject names the problem, and the preview promises an answer a parent can use in minutes.
For Mei Ling: subject "Two Saturdays left for December birthday cakes", preview "Plus the new rainbow layer design, from this month's orders." The subject carries the urgent news. The preview adds a second reason to open.
Write the subject and preview together, and read them together in your tool's inbox preview before you send.
Some tactics raise opens once and cost you afterwards. The most common is putting "RE:" or "FWD:" at the start of a marketing subject line, to make it look like part of a personal conversation. Readers feel tricked when they open it and find a promotion, and a tricked reader is more likely to unsubscribe or press the spam button. Complaints hurt your delivery, as lesson 3.3 explained.
The same applies to subject lines that promise something the email does not deliver, fake urgency, and all capitals. The open is worth less than the trust it spends.
If your tool lets you test two subject lines against each other, it will usually offer to pick a winner by open rate, which is less reliable than it looks. Privacy features in some email apps, Apple Mail Privacy Protection being the best known, load emails in the background, so many of them count as opened whether or not anyone read them. Lesson 8.1, Why open rates no longer tell you much, explains how this works.
A better measure is clicks, or replies if your email asks for them. Someone who clicked definitely read the subject, opened, and found the email worth acting on. If your tool can pick the winner by clicks, use that. If it cannot, compare click numbers yourself after the send. With a small list, treat any single result as a hint rather than a rule, which lesson 8.3 covers.
In the activity below you will write ten subject line and preview text pairs for your next newsletter, then choose the two you would test against each other.
Write ten subject line and preview text pairs for your next newsletter and pick the two you would test against each other.
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