In Internet surveys e-mails are the most commonly used invitation mode. Often being the first contact the goal of e-mails are to convince members of the sample to participate in a survey. Here, potential respondents decide on the basis of the e-mail content whether to proceed or ignore the invitation. We report on the findings of an eye-tracking experiment to show how respondents read e-mail invitations and process an e-mail inbox. In an experiment several characteristics of the e-mail invitation were varied such as the position of information (top vs. bottom of incentive and estimated duration) and use of bold text vs. normal text.

Participants were instructed with a cover story to process a pre-build inbox and were not informed about the included e-mail invitation. The main objective of this research was to test different forms of e-mail invitations while keeping the same amount of content across conditions. Dependant variables were the amount of eye fixations on various text elements and success rates for the recall of the e-mail content.

We discuss how information with a high possibility to convince respondents to participate in an Internet survey should be presented in an e-mail to maximize response rates.