Takeaways from ‘Acquire an Eye for Email Design’ webinar

Last Thursday, eROI hosted the “Acquire an Eye for Email Design” webinar, which discussed how eyemapping (heatmapping) can pinpoint flaws in email designs. (View the archived webinar.) Here are just a few of the great insights and learnings from the event:

>>According to Greg Edwards, CEO and founder of eyemapping service provider Eyetools, the technology can be used to several ends: (1) improving/validating your own email design, (2) generating competitive intelligence by analyzing competitors’ emails, and (3) analyzing landing pages, in addition to websites and shopping carts. There were several questions asked about landing page analysis.
>>Unlike most email analytic tools, eyemapping can be used to optimize emails before they are sent.
>>When asked about best practices in email design that have come out of eyemapping, Edwards said that eyemapping actually proved that some “best practices” aren’t in some cases. For instance, while it’s indeed a best practice to have the call to action above the fold, he said, “There’s no rule that everything has to be above the fold.” And forcing too much above the fold clutters the page and “actually reduces reading.” Despite some skepticism from some of the attendees, he said that readers will indeed scroll down through emails with the proper content and design.
>>The most interesting part of the webinar was seeing eyemapping in action on a real client: Circuit City. (Imagine my glee that it was a major online retailer!) Here’s the analysis of one of their emails (which looks to me to be an email Circuit City sent out on Oct. 19)…



…and here are the resulting design improvements:


For me, the takeaway on this particular example is to make sure that your email—especially the primary message—is easily scannable and that the eye can move down through the copy quickly. Also make sure that the call to action is highly visible. In this case, they made the call to action bigger and brought it in line with the rest of the copy, instead of off in the corner. I bet that using a button instead of a link would have raised the visibility of the call to action even further.
>>This example didn’t address the rest of Circuit City’s email template, which is where I think there’s probably a big return waiting, since the bulk of the template doesn’t change often. I can think of more than a few retailers that could benefit greatly from a one-time analysis of their overall email template.