Email Marketing solutions

You've Got High Tech Email to be more precise. This was the starting sentence of a Wall Street Journal article I read saying that email marketing is getting another look from the heavy hitting marketers like IBM and Cisco Systems. These are the two of the many companies who shyed away from email marketing after the spamming wars of the late nineties. There is a new company that is giving these fortune five hundred marketers a reason to send email again. Eyetools, a San Francisco software company has developed a technology called "heatmapping." This technology can tell marketers what parts of their emails get the most attention. Heatmapping uses cameras attached to a computer that track a person's eye movements to figure out what part of the screen is being viewed. The results are displayed in vivid colors on what is called a "heatmap" that makes clear where on the screen people's eyes focus.

Eyetools has two email services. The first one discovers whether your key message is getting through and is tested in an email client. The second one is for email campaign optimization of landing pages. That way you can see how your offer performs from email open to landing page. Their pricing ranges by a per person cost to a ten person group study cost. Most of their clients want data collected as a group of people open their email and see what they click on as well as see what they are drawn to once the do reach their landing page.

Once a person gets to the landing page heatmapping can again be used to see what the reader is looking at first and what they are likely to click on once they make a decision. Eyetools has done some extensive research on search engines like Google in uncovering what they are calling their "Golden Triangle". This "Golden Triangle" is the study of how heatmapping verifies the importance of page position and rank in both Organic and PPC search results for visibility and click through in Google.

Last but not least if your company is interested in doing your own studies in-house, Eyetools can supply you with the necessary equipment needed to do the same type of heatmapping research. Currently they feature two particular products, The Tobii 1750 eye-tracker and the Tobii x-50 eye-tracker. The Tobii 1750 is a fully integrated monitor that can do the heatmapping all in one unit. The x-50 is an eye-tracking camera that mounts on top of any monitor but has to be calibrated each time it is moved.

So, would you use or encourage your company to use such a service before you sent out your next email marketing campaign? With all that is going on to attract and keep people reading emails, I say yes, with my eyes wide open.