Ask yourself: Are You a Consummate Email Designer or a Cake Decorator?

Jakob Nielson is one of the world’s most influential designers, as named by Business Week and a leading researcher in online usability issues. He recently published his latest study on eyetracking on photos as online content. Email marketers should pay close attention to his finding on how readers are actually seeing emails.

Email designs can be broken into two categories. There are the experts that craftily piece together textual and visual content to be harmonious and relevant. The other group is the “cake decorators,” who haphazardly overdo it with decoration all over the email.

Nielsen's study discovered that some types of images are entirely ignored by readers. These are the types of images included in emails and other online content that are out of proportion to the rest of the page and used strictly for decoration.

In the cases where the images are relevant and contain information that the reader is interested in, the eyetracking studies show that these are the images that are strongly focused upon.

An email marketer should not conclude that the key to engaging the reader visually is to cram their emails and landing pages with countless tiny, highly detailed photos. Provide only content that is strictly relevant and purely informative!

For visual learners (video): Applying Dr. Jakob Nielsen’s Eyetracking Study to Your Email Marketing

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