Important elements, such as the central message and a call-to-action element, should be placed at the top of the email - after all, only a small proportion of recipients scroll.    The above-the-fold recommendation is probably one of the oldest best practices in email design. But is that assumption still true today? After all, we've long since gotten used to scrolling through the endless news feeds of Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter — especially on smartphones, which are where a large proportion of emails are opened today.    Jason Rodriguez from Litmus took on the question and put the above-the-fold recommendation to the test :   The Nielsen Norman Group, a well-known usability firm,  released a study  comparing scrolling and reading behavior between 2010 and 2018. They found that, while only 20% of time was spent below the fold in the past, 43% of people's time is spent below the fold more recently.   So, unsurprisingly, user behavior has changed over the years. So can we ignore the recommendation in the future? Probably not, says Jason:    However, the same study makes a point of calling out the fact that people still don't scroll  that much . The study essentially used long pages grouped as “screenfuls.” In 2010, 80% of time was spent in the first three screenfuls of content. More recently, that has  increased to  81 % of time. Yep, just one percentage point more.   So, it might be more accurate to say that the fold has turned from the bottom of a screen into a few swipes of the thumb instead.   Users scroll more frequently today than they did a few years ago, but of course not every email is viewed in its entirety: we receive more and more emails every day and have to answer each other in less and less time (often based on the sender, the subject line and the preview window). decide which messages we pay attention to and which we don't. So the following still applies: the most important thing at the top.