Pre-header text is a line of text that is displayed after the subject line when viewing an email from the inbox. Many mobile, web mail and desktop clients allow readers to preview the first few lines of text in your email, to offer a glimpse of the content that awaits.

The text underlined in orange are examples of how pre-header text is displayed in the inbox view of Web mail for Outlook.

The text underlined in orange are examples of pre-header text displayed in the inbox view of Outlook for mobile.

Pre-header texts allow you to take control of what your subscribers can preview. They work alongside subject lines to encourage recipients to open your email.

Use the Pre-header text option in Enudge to add your custom text. When building an email campaign, go to the Campaign Details page and fill in the following field:

We highly recommend adding pre-header text to your email campaigns as it's a great tool to encourage readers to open an email. This can be a single line summary of the email, a call to action or even an interesting fact. If left blank, email clients who show preview text will display the first line of text in your email by default.

Since the purpose of pre-header texts is to encourage email opens, it is redundant to display them within the body of the email.

Below is an example of an email sent using Enudge. This email has the pre-header text "New Alpha Collection", as shown in the examples above. As you can see, there is no sign of the pre-header text anywhere in the body. Neither does it appear after the subject line, nor is it displayed before the first line of text in the email body.