Balance Online Text & Graphics Strategically

What should be the balance between text and graphics in your email ads? Researchers at Emory University, Indiana University, and University of British Columbia say the answer depends on what you want the consumer to do and whether it’s a new or previous customer.

• If you’re aiming for the email to link to an online purchase, include more text than pictures. This is true with both prospective and previous customers. 
• If you want to open a correspondence in which you’ll encourage a new customer to visit your bricks-and-mortar store, use more pictures than text in the email ad. 
• To open that correspondence with a previous customer, the text-heavy and the picture-heavy emails did equally well. 

     The data for the study were responses to email ads from a fashion retailer which sells clothing and accessories for special events. Your results might vary if you retail other types of merchandise.
     With website ads, it is the informative text shoppers will focus on, and viewers want to easily read and interact with that text to get more information. Easy interaction means making it unambiguous what can be clicked and what the click will give you, for instance.
     Eye tracking research found that about 52% of viewers looked at an ad containing solely text. When the text was superimposed on a graphic or image, the viewership percentage dropped to 35%, and with animation, viewership was only 29%.
     In the studies, the average time spent looking at a web ad was about one-third of a second. Other researchers find this is enough time for the ad to have a subconscious effect on shoppers. When consumer psychologists talk about priming a shopper, we’re usually referring to planting an idea in such a way that the customer doesn’t recognize it’s being done. Research finds that delivering the prompt below the level of awareness makes the prompt more influential over a shopper’s behavior. When a shopper is aware of the priming, he’s more likely to feel manipulated and fight back. Subconscious primes result in fewer counterarguments.
     All this is enough for building intentions to visit your store or purchase what you offer, with the consumer to act on those intentions in the future. But if you want more immediate results, you’ll want to get the website visitor involved beyond a fraction of a second. The right picture accompanied by the right text can prolong the consumer’s attention.

Click below for more: 
Depend on Interactive Text in Web Ads 
Dump Purchase Ideas into the Subconscious