Have you ever thought about changing the pre-header (the very tippy-top portion of your email campaigns) in your email templates to something more compelling?

For example, the default pre-header in MailChimp is a link to view the email in your browser:

Here’s a pre-header that asks recipients to “add us to your address book:”

Nothing wrong with all the above, but some of you might want to try inserting a compelling offer up there instead, like this one from Banana Republic:

Notice how their first line is a compelling offer, and they moved the “view this in your browser” link to the 2nd line?

Some say it’s worth a try, especially if you have lots of subscribers who check email on mobile devices. That’s because mobile devices will often give a “preview” of a message by displaying the first line. Here’s an inbox screenshot from Apple’s iPhone:

Learn more about pre-headers from Lisa Harmon here.

If you use MailChimp, you can change the default pre-header line by just clicking on it in your template builder. That’ll open up the content editor, and you can make all the changes you want:

Above is an example from this Thanksgiving email that I recently sent to MailChimp News subscribers.

Give it a try!