The term ‘above the fold’ is generally referred to a specific placement of advertising in print media such as newspapers and periodicals. Essentially placing a print ad above the fold means you are placing it above the main area of content in that publication. Ideally you would be paying more for this placement as it will automatically give your ad more attention as opposed to being placed anywhere else within the newspaper or magazine. This was an important element of marketing when the days of using primarily above the line or ATL media was the core strategy for reaching audiences.
In the wake of digital media and email marketing, above the line mediums such as print, radio and TV are losing their wider reaching significance over personal and interactive ways of communication that are also cost effective in the long run. How much does it cost you to place an email in an inbox or for the investment in email marketing software? In fact the creation of the content would also cost less than what an ad agency would have charged you to develop a print campaign.
The concept of the fold also translates into email marketing but in a slightly different manner. With email marketing you are not competing for attention with other competitors of advertisements in the same space because you own the entire content you are sending out and thereby have the undivided attention of your reader. Once you have a headline that will encourage the reader to open your email they will first come across the upper end of your content to them. Ideally this is where you create an above the fold message or header for your content that will quickly give them the pertinent information they need to ascertain whether they will read on or not.
This is your opportunity to best use the features in your email marketing software and create a panel in the upper end of your email with no more than a couple of sentences of text that will stand out against the rest, because your email subject line has already given away the headline. Email marketing platforms such as Maxmail allow you to have multiple customizable templates which will allow you to create this above the fold communication that you can design based on your brand colours and other elements making this all the more easier to do.
There are strategies from traditional marketing that could be applied to email marketing and other digital channels – the point is to understand how to customize the strategy for the medium for the best results.