New Eye-Tracking Test Results: E-mail Campaign Click Patterns Surprise

MarketingSherpa’s research team has just completed an all-new round of eye-tracking tests, this time on e-mail design. We went into the eye-tracking lab (operated by our research partners at Eyetools) in San Francisco with some real-life e-mails we had received. One was an e-mail newsletter, one was a Forrester white-paper offer, and one was a sales alert from an e-commerce site marketing a range of New Balance footwear. (If you’d like to see a live sample of that New Balance e-mail, including a heat map of results, click here for our executive summary PDF.)

In all cases, seemingly small design changes wound up causing significant changes in the ways that consumers’ eyes looked at the e-mail–including how many words they read, how far they scrolled down, and whether they clicked on anything.

The last point is the most fascinating for me –and may be the most surprising for your design team. After all, your e-mail goal is probably to get clicks that your site can then convert, right?

When we set up our e-mail samples at the lab, although they were real-life creative samples, none of the hotlinks were live at the time. So when consumers scrolled over the e-mail with their mice, they didn’t get that little clickable-link hand icon that you would normally see.

You might think that this would discourage clicking. In fact, it didn’t appear to at all.

Every single e-mail we tested got plenty of clicks. However–and this is the fact you need to share with your e-mail design team–many clicks were not on areas of the creative that normally would have been clickable.

People don’t limit their clicks to underlined text or specific buttons. Not one bit.

In other words, when people click on your e-mail, they don’t always carefully figure out where the clickable link is. They just bang away at their mouse. As with the Web pages we’ve tested, some of the most popular “nonclickable” clicks are on images, including product hero shots, logos, and photos of people.

How should this affect your design?

Option #1: Make your entire e-mail clickable. Unfortunately, if you make the entire e-mail clickable, your campaign will be stopped as spam by some filters. So if you plan on that, be sure to invest in e-mail deliverability and certification services beyond your routine broadcast software or service.

Option #2: Make all photos and images clickable. This is the better option, but it does mean you’ll have to figure out where hotlinks should lead. If you have photos or images such as happy models or author headshots on the e-mail, should those clicks go to the article or the top sales item you are offering, or should they go to information about that particular person?

In any event, designers who dress up an e-mail by slinging stock photos on them should be discouraged unless you’ve already tested e-mails with and without the photos. You’re wasting attention and clicks on images that may not further your purpose. (If your branding relies on stock photos, you’re in trouble anyway.)

Option #3: Add more right-side and top-of-e-mail hotlinks. Many of the click patterns we noticed were right-side and top-of-creative clicks. Consider adding extra hotlinks at the very top (aside from or perhaps in place of your “please whitelist us” copy, which can be lower down) and at the right side of your copy.

Hotlinks buried within text, especially in the middle of a paragraph, may not work as well. Move those to the edges of your copy–and consider making your headline clickable as well as your “read more” link.

My best wishes with your end-of-year e-mail campaigns!

Anne Holland is president of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing buyer’s guides and benchmark data for its 237,000 marketing executive subscribers. For a copy of MarketingSherpa’s new E-mail Marketing Benchmark Guide for 2007, which includes eight new eye-tracking heat-maps go to: www.sherpastore.com/email-benchmark.html?8966.

Other articles by Anne Holland:

TV Blitz Helps Ask.com Grow Market Share

New Data on Search Marketing Click Fraud: Three Action Items

Newest Eye-Tracking Study Results for Google

Absolutely Pitiful E-Commerce Shopping Cart Abandonment Stats…and Four Ways to Improve Yours

Study Data: Reasons to Get Evangelical About Evangelism Marketing

The Year’s Best and Worst Lead-Generation Offers

The Two Easiest (and Most Overlooked) Ways to Improve E-mail Response

1,120 Shoppers Say Why They Abandon E-commerce Sites

Eye-Tracking Results: E-commerce Site As Search Site

E-mail Audits Reveal the Infuriating Realities of E-mail Campaign Delivery