After reading an article by (Hernandez & Resnick, 2013) about how the placement of call to action buttons can impact a consumers desire to continue their eCommerce experience it got me thinking about the 20+ marketing emails I get a day and which ones I actually read let alone click through to the landing page.

The one I’m particularly interested in is a ‘get the latest deals’ email I received from Ebay earlier. It is an opt in email and is an event triggered email to promote Christmas deals, however is not personalised in any way. I believe it also draws on the life cycle theory as well to try and regain my custom. Theory states that these types of emails tend to get very high open rates – but does that turn into conversion rates?

The article describes several user scan patterns and how eye tracking research helps companies to lead the consumer through the purchase funnel. When opening the ebay email I believe I used a Z -Pattern to scan the page, this meant I looked at all 4 quadrants and was less likely to miss relevant content.

The call to action is mainly on the top horizontal line, which meant I was automatically drawn to the seasonal aspect of the email and was encouraged to click through to the landing page, which led directly to their Christmas deals as stated. This allows users to browse categories or conduct searches all leading them through towards a purchase.

By analysing the user scan patterns and the ebay email marketing I believe it has quite a successful placement of call to action.

However the question that I’ve got now… does the same apply for emails opened on a mobile device? Does this encourage different user scan patterns, does the placement of call to action buttons need to be changed for mobile devices?  I’ve come across another interesting blog about CTA buttons which gives some thought into mobile devices.

https://litmus.com/blog/click-tap-and-touch-a-guide-to-cta-best-practices 

Hernandez, A., & Resnick, M. L. (2013, September). Placement of Call to Action Buttons for Higher Website Conversion and Acquisition An Eye Tracking Study. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 57, No. 1, pp. 1042-1046). SAGE Publications.