Designing Above The Fold For Blogs, E-mail, And More

Have you heard the term "Above The Fold" before? It comes from the newspaper industry. Newspapers are displayed for sale by being folded in half with only the top half of the front page visible. Publishers learned quickly that your most compelling headlines must be visible, above the fold, for newspapers to sell. Imagine, the content of an entire paper hinging on what's put on that relatively small piece of printable real estate.

Marketing mediums that you use may also have an "Above The Fold" area as well. E-mails, websites and blogs are the first mediums that come to mind, but any marketing message that you create for public consumption can easily fall into this category. Since blogs, websites and e-mails are not physically folded, where is the "Above The Fold" area?

When you open your e-mail, what do you see? The whole message at once? Probably not. Chances are that you have too scroll down to read the rest of the message. The part you see when you first open the e-mail is the "Above The Fold" area. It's anything you see without scrolling to read more information. The same is true for websites and blogs.

One thing that many internet marketers forget about designing for "Above The Fold" is that a visitor may also have to scroll left and right to see the entire message. That means the anything, let's say, on a third sidebar that may not be visible when someone loads the page on the screen should technically be considered below the fold even though it is literally way off to the right.

So, what are the considerations of designing a marketing message "Above The Fold"? Here are a few to keep in mind:

• Know Your Goals- You may read a lot of experts who tell you what needs to be above the fold, but the truth is that they don't know what belongs above the fold in your situation. Is your goal to sell ads? Then your ads need to be above the fold. Is your goal to grow your subscriber list? Then your opt-in form needs to be above the fold. Is your goal to get people to read your post? Then a compelling headline needs to be above the goal. Know what your main goals are as you design for the fold.
  
  
• Keep It Clean- Some people look at the previous point and say, "All of those things are my goals," so they try to cram everything in above the fold. Putting too much information into one space will often have the opposite effect. Readers get information overload and just click onto to another web page to read or delete your e-mail message altogether. Having clean layout means you will have to pick and choose your goals to focus on above the fold.
  
  
• Test Your Goals- You don't have to guess what belongs above the fold. You can test it to find out exactly what needs to be there. That's what the most successful marketers do. For more information on testing, read my previous posts, Split Test Your Opt In Page For More Subscribers and Using Landing Pages and Squeeze Pages To Sell More Books And Products.
  
  
• Learn Ways To Mitigate "Above The Fold" Dangers- What's the biggest danger in the "Above The Fold" principle? That your visitors will leave the page without acting on the goal you have. If some of your goals are below the fold (because we should not cram all of our goals above the fold, right?), then there are things we can do to encourage people to scroll down (or scroll right) to see other information. For a very intriguing study on this, take a look at study conducted by Joe Leech and Fiz Yazdi called The myth of the page fold: evidence from user testing. While it does test eye tracking as it relates to scroll bar use, it does not test call-to-action conversions (i.e., will more people sign up for your newsletter if the opt-in form is above the fold vs. below the fold). It does, however, make some very intriguing discoveries that is backed by solid testing. The strength of their research is that it helps us learn what can do better to mitigate the "Above The Fold" dangers.
  

With a little planning and by being clear on our goals, we can design some great "Above The Fold" marketing strategies for our marketing messages. As always, if we follow it up with testing, then we can see consistently better and better results.

Tony Eldridge