Many companies dream big, but are often underwhelmed by the results of their email marketing campaigns. The key to getting it right is to understand what your customers find to be engaging, and designing emails according to that information.
Heat maps are a tool used commonly when talking about websites but, little is said about them in relation to email marketing. If you’re sending out emails to prospects or customers, heat map techniques can be used to understand how your readers view your messages. This insight can then be applied to future sends, allowing you to fine tune your email designs for better performance next time.
Heat map analysis uses eye tracking and cursor tracking software – couple this with statistical analysis, data collection and machine learning and you have the tools you need to better understand your email performance.
In the infographic below, we’ve showed how heat maps can be applied to emails and used three metrics; clarity score, attention map and excitingness to draw some meaningful conclusions.
Excitingness is a design metric which tells you how a large group of users would judge your design. Would they find it exciting or not? Excitingness can vary from calm to stimulating and where your email design fits on the scale will depend very much on your target audience. A young audience might respond better to a high level of excitingness for example, while an older or B2B email may call for a calmer appearance and lower excitingness score.
Source: http://www.easy-smtp.com/create-eye-catching-email-designs
