Email Newsletter Usability from Alertbox
I’ve been working on some integrations between Salesforce.com and email marketing services, so I was really interested when Andrew forwared on Jakob Nielsen’s article revisiting email newsletter usability. He makes some interesting points, especially around how people just don’t read the things you’d think they would:
People were highly inclined to skip the introductory blah-blah text in newsletters. Although this text was only three lines long on average, our eyetracking recordings revealed that 67% of users had zero fixations within newsletter introductions.
The eye tracking stuff is really cool, too. Note that nobody’s looking at the graphic boxes on the lower right. They look to me like ads, don’t they? They’re not, but people seem to be conditioned to ignore that space. Fun stuff.
