The First Link Lost

After sending hundreds of Marketing Untied emails and sharing well over 500 marketing ideas, we wanted to answer a common question:

Does the top link in an email always get clicked the most?

Research says yes, at least partially. There is decades-long evidence on “position bias,” the idea that people naturally click the first thing they see.

Readers scan quickly. Attention drops as they move down the page.

Top-positioned links usually have an advantage.

So, I reviewed our own Marketing Untied email data with the hypothesis that the 1st of the 5 links would regularly be the most-clicked.

It didn’t take long for that to fall apart

In email after email, the first featured link was not the highest-clicked article.

One email’s top-positioned article generated 133 clicks.

A lower-positioned article in the same email generated 144.

That changed the conclusion entirely.

Position helps visibility. But curiosity drives clicks.

The strongest-performing links weren’t necessarily first.

They were the ones that created tension, emotion, intrigue, or a strong “I need to know this” reaction.

That’s a fascinating marketing lesson.

Because it means good marketing isn’t just about placement, formatting, or button color.

It’s about whether the idea is compelling enough to interrupt someone’s attention.

We still obsess over structure:

• CTA placement
• visual hierarchy
• link order
• readability

But this experiment reinforced something even more important: No matter what, keep trying to share ideas worth stopping for.

Next blog, we’re digging into that.

What was it about the language of the winning links that made people click them more?