Reeling from the triple-threat of spam filters, anti-spam legislation and smarter users, emarketers are resorting to space-age technology to get you to react to their email: eye-tracking monitors.

Here’s how it works: An emarketing outfit creates its e-campaign… often embedded in a newsletter format… then hires an eye-tracking service to test it.

The eye-tracking service puts together a focus group matching the emarketer’s audience. As each focus grouper reads the marketer’s pitch, a special monitor tracks every eyeball quiver over 1 cm.

At the conclusion of tracking, a heatmap of the emarketer’s original message is built. As you can imagine, red areas attracted the most reader attention, while blue areas were relatively unread.

Colin Johnson, President of heatmapper Eyetools, puts it this way:

If it is not in the data, it is not in the minds of your customers. The aggregate image is helpful … because it gives a single-glance depiction of what information you can assume visitors have in their minds … It is critical to emphasize that if the data says that people did not look at a given area of a page, then it’s true. They really did NOT look at that area.

By tweaking the e-pitch for lots of maximal red zones, the emarketer maximizes sales.

Heatmapped Email
An email message heatmapped after eyeball tracking. -- Eyetools

At about $2500 per 10-person focus study, heatmapping email is a cost-effective tool for boosting profitable response… Chump change for typical heatmap clients, like eBay, Microsoft, and Ogilvy.

These are the kind of folks who know that, even if they can get you to open an opt-in message, you’ll be gone within 20 words or 50 seconds… so every word and its placement must count. Your eyes don’t lie.

That’s why so many emarketing messages are so similar. They all make liberal use of HTML, bullets, buttons-instead-of-explicit-links and bold fonts… but not too much bold because, as every heatmapper knows, it can be too riveting. Readers are more likely to ignore a few of the lines of copy preceding a bold line.

Despite all those heatmapping studies, emarketers seem to have overlooked a critical discovery: Readers are more likely to peruse ads that aren’t significantly different in color or spacing from surrounding copy… especially text ads.

This oversight makes it pretty easy for you to tailor incoming emarketed messages to taste. Just tweak your spam filter… Almost any spam filter will do.

Set your filter to block graphics, disable hidden links, or mangle HTML altogether.

In the process of killing e-pitches, you’ll discombobulate most phishing attempts and many viruses, as both depend heavily on things you can’t readily see.

Don’t get me wrong. Heatmapping’s a great tool for improving usability and response rates. But I like it much better when applied to websites.

When heatmapping conclusions are applied to messaging, the result is usually profligate HTML abuse, which opens the door for phishing lookalikes. Email’s better off without it.