That’s right. 81% of people don’t read the newsletters they subscribe to. They scan, skim & glance instead—-in less than a minute!
According to Alertbox’s Jakob Neisen, the guru of web useability studies, eye tracking tests confirm that
….users are extremely fast at both processing their inboxes and reading newsletters: the average time allocated to a newsletter after opening it was only 51 seconds. “Reading” is not even the right word, since participants fully read only 19% of newsletters. The predominant user behavior was scanning. Often, users didn’t even scan the entire newsletter: 35% of the time, participants only skimmed a small part of the newsletter or glanced at the content.
Ouch. You spend good money for newsletters nobody is reading. So what’s a hard working broker or agent to do? Here are some tips on how to market to scanners, skimmers & glancers:
- Eye Catching images/photos (and we don’t mean the agent’s smiling face).
- Great headline. Examples/links on how to craft headlines here. The first 2 words are the most important (”how to” “5 ways”)
- Bullets. This is the best scanner bait.
- Keep it short. Use a blurp instead. Add “white space“.
- Bold key words or phrases if you must use a lot of text
- Give something away. “Free” is the top adword of all time.
Here is a eye-tracking heatmap. Notice the red & yellow zones by photos & bullets & along left side.
Movie Poster: The Crawling Eye (1958 Tempean Productions Ltd.)
