Marketing Sherpa, www.marketingsherpa.com is a website for small and medium businesses that provides "Practical News & Case Studies on Internet Advertising, Marketing & PR." They have recently published their Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006...real-life data and observations from thousands of email marketers.
One of their observations pertained to how we read email, especially from email marketeers. The conclusion: Human eyes read more text when email includes pictures.
You would think that the opposite would prove true...that pictures are a distraction from the text. In fact, the presence of an image, even a fairly dull one, can have a huge impact upon how much time people's eyes spend reading the copy of the ad. Although viewers don't spend a lot of time on the picture itself...the image is on our periphery...its presence raises the engagement level with the email, as well as the willingness to read much more of the copy.
We decide to open an email based upon the "from" and "subject" lines. Step #2 of the process is deciding whether we've made the right decision to view the email...that it is relevant for us. This second step happens quickly.
Pictures cause the eyes to linger longer.
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