How to Improve Your Business’s Email Marketing Efforts with Simple Design Solutions

There is a lot of chatter about using heat map analysis on websites, however there is relatively little about using it to analyze marketing emails. Many companies spend a good chunk of their marketing budget on email marketing only to be underwhelmed by the results. There is often little to none actionable data that gives insights into what went wrong with the email marketing campaign. One way to get around this problem is by using heat map software to understand what people find engaging. Using this information you can then design your emails according to that knowledge to create more effective emails. 

Easy SMTP and EyeQuant recently teamed up to analyze a number of email marketing campaigns using specialized heat map software. They took a number of different campaigns and rated them based on three different factors. The three factors were a clarity score, an excitingness score and an attention map score. Each email received a score for each of the three factors as well as feedback and pro tips on how to improve each one. The emails came from a wide variety of sources including an advertisement, a trade publication, B2B marketing, financial services, and a product description. They then turned the information from analyzing the emails into a comprehensive infographic (featured below). You can see the results here.

They also offered a series of takeaways based on what they learned from their heat map analysis. Some of the more interesting takeaways:

• Using white space is important to steer the eye toward your desired target.

• By narrowing the options available to the user, you are able to focus your message.

• Use a simple design with contrasting call to actions. 

• If you have technical content, focus on a clean display. 

• It is important to be mindful of colors and secondary elements in images. 

As you can see there is a lot of useful information that can be learned by using heat map analysis on emails. By analyzing your current email marketing campaigns, you can learn what is working and what isn’t and adjust the design of your emails accordingly.

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