| Best Practices In Strategic Email Marketing | June 2005 |
Technique
Why 'Above the Fold'?
By Randall Litchfield
An article of faith when designing client newsletters at
Inbox is to avoid scrolling as much as possible. There are various
reasons, but they really boil down to one – human nature. In our
busy, time-starved lives with no end of things trying to grab our
attention, we don’t like to hunt. We spend, on average, 15 seconds
deciding if an email is worth reading or not and the important stuff
had better be visible. ‘Above the fold’ in Web and email land means contained within the screen of the average person’s monitor (a 1024 X768 display setting seems to be the most common today). What happens to links that appear below the fold? After testing many client newsletters we have discovered that they experience an amazing half-life of near mathematical predictability.
The chart below, for example, graphs the click count of links distributed down the three screens of a customer’s newsletter. Each screen had approximately the same number of links and, with each successive screen, click through activity decreased by 50%. The scary thing is that this chart looks pretty much the same on any multi-screen newsletter we have analyzed. People don’t like to scroll.
So how do you avoid scrolling? One way is to take design cues from print publishers and make your newsletter look like the contents page of a good magazine. Contents pages are good reads in themselves. The headline, story blurb and graphic of each article is just enough to make you want to flip the pages or – in this case – click through.