Preview Text You Forgot to Set

The line you did not write

An inbox shows three things about a message: who it is from, the subject, and a short extract beside or beneath it.

That third element is preview text, and it is roughly as visible as the subject line.

If you have not set it, the mail client takes whatever text appears first in the message body.

Which on most templates is a link saying view this email in your browser, or a line about why you are receiving this, or an unsubscribe instruction.

So a meaningful share of what a reader sees in their inbox is administrative boilerplate nobody chose to put there.

What it is worth

• Roughly the same space as the subject line again.
• A second chance to say why this is relevant.
• Room for detail the subject had no space for.
• Free, since it is a field you already have.
• Ignored by most small business senders.

The last is what makes it worth mentioning at all: it is one of the few remaining places where doing something ordinary distinguishes you from most of the inbox.

Write it as a continuation

The approach that works, rather than repeating the subject.

Treat the subject and preview as one sentence in two parts: the subject makes the point and the preview adds the detail that decides it.

Subject: Boiler service before winter. Preview: Slots left in the last week of October, and what the check covers.

That combination tells somebody almost everything, and the ones who open are the ones who want it.

Repeating the subject wastes the space, and leaving it empty gives it away to the template.

Where the tool has no field for it, the first line of the message body serves the same purpose, so make that line count rather than starting with a greeting.

Length and truncation

Practical constraints, since it is truncated differently everywhere.

Somewhere between forty and a hundred characters is displayed depending on the client, the device, and how long the subject line was.

Which means the first forty or so are what you can rely on, and anything after that is a bonus.

Write it so it makes sense truncated at forty characters, in the same way as the subject.

Avoid ending on a preposition or a partial phrase, since a cut-off preview reads as carelessness rather than as a tease.

A worked example

A business sent a message with the subject Two weeks left for spring bookings.

Beside it in every inbox appeared the words view this email in your browser, followed by their postal address, because that was the first text in their template.

They set the preview field to name the three services included and the date bookings closed.

The next send used the same subject line and the same content, with the preview text filled in.

Opens rose by a noticeable margin and, more usefully, the enquiries mentioned the specific service named in the preview rather than asking what was included.

The change took two minutes and had never been considered because the field had no obvious consequence.

Check what it currently shows

The five-minute audit, which most people have never done.

Send yourself a test message and look at it in the inbox list rather than opening it.

Do it on a phone and on a desktop client, since they truncate differently and show different amounts.

Note what appears beside the subject, and whether it is anything you would have chosen.

Repeat with a message from your automated sequence, since those are set up once and never inspected, and they are frequently the worst offenders.

The whitespace trick and why to skip it

Worth mentioning because it is widely recommended.

Some senders pad the preview with invisible characters so that the template boilerplate is pushed out of view entirely, leaving only the intended text.

That works and it is a workaround for a field most tools now provide properly.

Use the tool's own preview field if it has one, which nearly all do, since padding is fragile, renders unpredictably in some clients, and adds invisible content to a message for no reason a filter would like.

If your tool genuinely has no field, moving the browser link and legal footer below your opening line achieves the same thing more simply.

Make it different every time

A small discipline that keeps it useful.

Preview text set once and reused becomes as invisible as the boilerplate it replaced, since a reader seeing the same second line each month stops reading it.

Write it as part of writing the message, in the same minute as the subject line, rather than as a setting configured in the template.

Where a tool defaults it to a fixed value, that is worth changing, because a fixed preview is only marginally better than none.

Two lines, written together, at the end of drafting the message, and it takes a minute.

The sender name is the third field

Worth naming while the inbox line is the subject, since it is the part read before either of the others.

The sender name is a setting in your mailing tool and it is frequently left as an address, a company abbreviation, or whatever was typed when the account was created.

A person's name alongside the business reads as correspondence rather than as a broadcast, and it is recognised faster in a list.

Keep it consistent across every message, including automated ones, because a reader who has learned to recognise one sender will not recognise a second.

It costs one change in the settings and it affects the decision more than the subject and preview together.

The counter-case

This is a small improvement and should be treated as one.

Preview text is not shown at all in some clients and is truncated to almost nothing in others, so the benefit reaches a portion of your list rather than all of it.

It also cannot rescue a message nobody wanted, and a business spending time optimising two lines while sending content of no interest has the priorities inverted.

And for a very small list where most recipients know you personally, who the message is from decides the opening far more than either line.

Set it, spend a minute on it each send, and go back to writing something worth opening.

The two minutes

1. Send yourself a test and look without opening.
2. Check on a phone and a desktop client.
3. Find the preview field in your tool.
4. Write it as a continuation of the subject.
5. Make sense in forty characters.
6. Change it every send.
7. Check your automated messages too.

Step seven is where this is most often wrong, since automated messages are configured once and their preview text is whatever the template put there years ago.

The line it sits beside is covered in writing a subject line somebody opens.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.