Philip Storey is the founder of the email marketing agency, Enchant. He is an email marketing guru with over 20 years of experience designing effective campaigns for some of the biggest companies in the UK.

With the help of EyeQuant’s eye-tracking analysis tools, Philip has been using eye-tracking to inform his strategies and designs for over 10 years. Here, we look at some of the benefits of eye-tracking data and top tips from the man himself!
 

Why eye-tracking?

Eye-tracking analysis provides a much deeper level of understanding of an email design than the basic analytics that we too often rely on to assess the success of a campaign. 

“As email marketers, we rarely get to meet our customers, so this helps us get closer to people and enables us to really put the customer first,” says Philip.
 

How to improve email design

For many design teams, there’s an all-too-familiar process for designing email marketing campaigns. Whether using content blocks from the company website or creating a template from scratch, most design processes end when the campaign is sent out – apart from some basic tinkering with a CTA or the copy length, there is usually little testing or experimentation performed, and no iteration.

While email marketing is generally a very effective medium with high conversion rates, it lags behind other digital media in terms of the attention that is placed on the user experience. It may be an effective medium, but if we apply some of the UX design techniques used for web design, it could become even better.

For a start, we should create a living design system that constantly evolves, much like we would for a website. We should put the customer first, avoid out-of-the-box templates, and think about the relationship that we want to have with our subscribers and how our designs support that.

8 steps for using eye-tracking in email marketing

1. Choose a goal: Make sure you know what you want to achieve.
2. Isolate the email into sections: Run eye-tracking tests on one section of the email at a time. Analysing an entire design with multiple sections could skew the results.
3. Run the eye-tracking tests.
4. Compare the results to other insights you might have, such as click maps.
5. Keep a record of your findings, even if they are unexpected.
6. Choose 1-3 things to test: Trying to test too many things at a time will likely dilute or skew the results.
7. Test and conclude: Test your design in live emails and monitor the performance.
8. Implement findings into your design system.
9. Bonus tip: Give your customers time to adapt to a new design – it might take a handful of emails before a new design begins to resonate with its audience.

10 top tips for optimising email campaigns with eye-tracking

1. Speak to your UX designers and gather insights from any usability and eye-tracking studies they’ve done before.
2. Think about what you want to learn or improve, then create a plan.
3. Make a hypothesis.
4. Run tests with an open mind.
5. Only test one section at a time.
6. Compare results with click behaviour.
7. Only change and test one thing at a time.
8. Start with the easiest elements to test.
9. Test all content blocks of your email.
10. Never stop testing! The end of a design project is just the start, as email design is an ongoing learning process.

Did you know? 

With EyeQuant Experience, you can now take your user analysis to the next level by looking at users’ focus and attention during a multi-channel journey – for example, from an email to a website, video, etc.

Learn more

Watch our full webinar with Philip Storey, which includes tips for improving click-through rates and optimising emails, and several case studies of effective email campaigns.