Mark Brownlow tweeted a link on Friday which is an interesting example from my friends at Think Eyetracking. While I have to admit I applaud any effort to get eye tracking more in the public eye, I am a little concerned that this was put out there without any additional information.
In the interest of full disclosure, I love eye tracking; it gives email marketers an amazing amount of information on how readers are reading their emails. Eye tracking uses infrared sensors around a computer screen to track eye movement, literally following the users eyes around the screen and matching that to click behaviour. Watching the eye movements of one user can be enlightening, but the power comes from looking at the aggregate eye tracks. By overlaying a number of eye tracks we can create a heatmap (like the picture mentioned above), which shows what is capturing reader’s attention.
The only problem with eye tracking is that too often marketers take the information as gospel rather than as the guide it is meant to be. Take the pictures that Mark posted for example. It is true that generally having a photo that focuses on the copy works better than having a photo that faces the reader. One of the things I have learned about eye tracking however, is that every element in the creative has an effect on every other element. So whilst the general rule is to have images of people facing the copy, you cannot guarantee that this will be the case in all instances.
Eye tracking is niether expensive nor time consuming. It can also be a great time saver by getting a new template design a long way towards optimised before putting it in the field. The rest of the optimisation is done by good old fashioned testing.
I recently ran a project for a client where we first used eye tracking to indicate which of three design concepts were the best. Interestingly, the one that came out on top had not been the client’s or the agency’s favourite. We then used these initial results to optimise the design and tested it again; further optimising the template from this second round of analysis before putting it in the field with a robust testing strategy to improve it further. We estimate that even if we had picked the right design in the first place, it would have taken eight to twelve months of testing to get to the version that we put in the field on day one.
Best practice and brand guidelines are a great place to start with your email design but eye tracking can give you a true understanding of how your readers read and interact with your email. It is important to remember that it is not a silver bullet and what works in one template may not work as well in another. With new low cost and quick turnaround services however, there is no reason not to give it a try and ultimately incorporate it into your standard email design process.
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http://www.coastams.co.uk Paul Moloney
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