Preview panes do indeed present a new challenge for BtoC marketers who typically were immune to their use. Generally found in the corporate inbox via Outlook or Lotus Notes, BtoB marketers have been dealing with preview pane challenges for many years, and as a result have become experts in maximizing the very real opportunity they present.

Generally, until now, consumers made decisions about which messages to open based on only two pieces of information: the “From” and the “Subject” line. Preview panes will actually allow marketers a third way to entice consumers to read their offers by automatically displaying some of the content contained in the email.

By taking a few extra hours and putting a little extra thought into the design of their emails, BtoC marketers can actually take advantage of preview panes and the “sneak peeks” they offer, just as BtoB marketers are already doing.

Getting the Message Out
So, what exactly is a preview pane? A preview pane in an email client is the much-smaller reading space—typically the 2-inch to 5-inch horizontal box located at the bottom of the screen for most users—that enables consumers to quickly scan their messages before opening them. For marketers, this means that they have to make their selling points within the first few inches of their messages.

The preview pane poses two significant rendering challenges to BtoC marketers:
1) It only shows a portion of the email.
2) In email clients that block images, it shows a blank space or a red X where the thoughtful, enticing and beautifully-designed graphics should appear.

The easiest way to overcome these hurdles is to think small. Since most email templates are design-heavy, BtoC marketers need to reevaluate what their key messages are and where they are placed in the email. Marketers need to ensure that the key details of their email render correctly so the consumer can “get the gist” of the offer from text and links without requiring images and other extraneous inclusions.

The email template should be redesigned with shrinking email real estate in mind: in addition to the preview pane and blocked images, display ads most commonly seen on the right hand side of the screen take space away from the traditional message window. If the template is redesigned correctly—and tested for these situations—a successful email campaign can still be achieved.

Believe it or not, putting your email opt-in invitation on the landing pages of your PPC campaigns is a simple — and frequently overlooked — way to boost your conversion rates and revenue.

Your PPC landing pages are often “one shot” propositions — the destinations visitors stumble upon only once. Permission-based email marketing extends your reach beyond a single site visit, finding these same visitors weeks, months or even years later — when they may actually be ready to convert or buy.

Skeptical? Consider this: if, on average, less than 3 percent of Pay-Per-Click visitors follow through with the intended call-to-action on your landing pages, and an equally small percentage convert and become buyers, what’s your paid search ROI?

Now what happens to ROI if you get more of these visitors to convert or buy without throwing additional money at them? It costs nothing to add an e-mail opt-in to your landing pages — and any additional business simply boosts the ROI of your PPC spends.

Don’t do anything drastic to your PPC landing pages
The only way to effectively combine PPC and permission-based email marketing — without leading your PPC visitors down the wrong (navigational) path — is to drive your visitors to take a single, desired action from your landing pages.

If you missed Effective Landing Pages 101 (usually taught in the marketer’s school of hard knocks), each landing page should be specifically customized based on the key words you purchased. If that key word is “bagels,” your landing page should offer concrete information on who you are and what you offer — in relation to bagels.

In addition, every word, link and image on your landing page should be powerfully optimized to drive your visitors down one specific conversion path — whether that’s buy now, sign up for an offer or download a demo.

That said, you can easily gain permission to stay in contact with your visitors, without distracting them from your primary marketing objective.

The how depends on what your email marketing goal is:

• Do you want to capture a fraction of the 97 percent who might otherwise click away from your site and be lost forever?

• Or do you want to focus on the 3 percent who do actually convert — and turn a higher percentage of them into buyers over time?