Heat maps are mostly associated with optimizing website performance. But not many people know that they can also be used to optimize your email design overall and click-through rates in particular.
If you don’t know where in your email people click on, which parts of your email they interact with the most, your emails can’t be 100% effective.
In this tutorial, we’re showing you how to stop guessing how to optimize your emails and start using heat maps to help you do that instead.
What is an email heatmap?
An email heat map illustrates how recipients interacted with an email, the most popular links, and the proportion of recipients that clicked on each link.
Do Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Omnisend, ActiveCampaign, and others have email heatmaps?
So majority, and maybe all email service providers have the ability to track where people click.
However, the thing is, if you have one link in multiple locations and doesn’t matter where it person clicks on that link, it’s, they’re recording that as a click. So if you need deeper analysis, you are not able to figure out whether they click on the top one or bottom one. Did they click on the image? Did they click on the bottom? And so forth.
So here’s an example. We use Active Campaign internally for our agency. For our customers we use Klaviyo. But just to give you an example:
So here’s you see 39 people clicked here. And 39 people clicked there. Just round it off 40 and 40. So does it mean like 80 people will click? No – it means only 39 click on both of those links. But I have no clue how many click on the top one and how many click on the bottom one.
So here’s another example from one of our customer. And it’s e-commerce email.
And as you can see on the top, it’s 69%, 69%, 2%, 2%. Again, it doesn’t mean that 69 people click on the top. Then 69 in the hero image. It’s like, the math does not add up. They just showed that that 69% of all people clicked on that link. But doesn’t matter where that is located.
So it’s a problem because if you’re not able to track where people clicking, you don’t know how effective your e-mails are. So right now I’ll show you a trick, how to fix it. And by the way, this issue is for all email marketing platforms: HubSpot, Klaviyo, Active Campaign and others.
There are third-party tools, which you can use, but you have to pay for them. Like Email on Acid – the good one, but it costs about a hundred dollars a month just to use that feature. They have advanced. I’ll show you a simple one.
So the easiest solution and free one is just to use ? = and whatever name you want to use. For example, here’s the example I showed you. We use our link flow link to our website in the logo, as well as in the body of the email.
So there are two locations. So the solution is to put a Flowium . com / ? = logo, so it will recognize as you click in that logo. And if I put in the body, I don’t know, I can put something like body, or. It doesn’t matter what you put. Something that you can easily understand.
And so basically it’s your link ? = and variable name, which is recognizable for you. And you have to do it for any link where you have that link more than one time. So if you have one link, you don’t have to do it. But if you have that link at least in two locations in the emails you have to implement this.
Email Heatmap Tools
In case you need a more advanced way to track your subscriber clicks, you might consider using one of the following tools:
