The Email Wars

I came across an interesting study this past week on the impact that images have on heat mapping in emails and the web. The study provided a few examples that they tested but this one in particular stood out to me due to the focus on the face instead of the copy and product.

What they found was that people are conditioned to look a the facial features of people when presented with the image on the left instead of reading the copy as much as they might be inclined to when the person in the photo was looking at the copy or product.

IMAGE from USEABLE WORLD

This study really resonates with me and hopefully you as it displays the impact that not only the images you choose but how they lend direction to the important things you are trying to drive people to read and do. This is worth a test in your own email creative. I know from the heat mapping we use in our own email plaform we see that in our own newsletter that the images we select are less likely to be clicked on verus the text links we use to drive people the content of our articles. The differences are almost a 2 to 1 difference in click action. This always stands out to me as we evaluate our own campaigns in the post mordems we run.

So your challenge this week is to reivew you past campaigns and look at the differences in images vs copy and how the images you use drive people to the goals of your campaigns.