• Marketing Sherpa, Monday, December 19, 2005 11:30 AM

Marketers who want their e-mail newsletters to be noticed (and even read closely) by recipients had better forget about sending then in a plain text format and should use an HTML format with graphics, which gets far more attention. That's one of the primary findings in a study by MarketingSherpa, which also discovered that recipients spend 10 to 20 seconds--at most--reading a typical e-mail campaign or newsletter. Researchers conducted a series of eyetracking laboratory tests to discover rules about the way human eyes "see" e-mail. The goal was to learn how e-mail designers and copywriters could get the highest message readership scientifically, which in turn should lead to higher response rates. One of the things researchers learned was that HTML e-mails with graphics got higher per-word readership and that the presence of an image--even a fairly dull one--can have a huge impact in how much time people's eyes spend reading the copy of an ad.

Read the whole story at Marketing Sherpa »