Email Newsletter Usability

There are 165 design guidelines for Newsletter Subscription, Content, Account Maintenance, and RSS News Feeds.

People have emotional reactions to newsletters. This is in stark contrast to studies of website usability, where users tend to be more focused on function. It will feel like a tool when you visit a website daily.

Newsletters can have a positive emotional aspect. A bond between user and company can be created. A website can. The negative aspect is that. The impact of usability problems is much stronger. The customer relationship is different than they normally do.

Users spend. 51 seconds. The average newsletter is read. In a crowded inbox, the layout and writing need to be user-friendly.

Newsletters lost potential subscribers due to difficulties in their subscription processes and designs. The unsubscribe process is worth improving because people often stay subscribed to newsletters they don’t want.

Newsletters need to be easy to read in order to reduce the burdens of modern life. The cost of e-mail is paid for by being helpful and relevant to users, and by communicating these benefits in a few characters in the subject line.

The report shows. What happened when people used real newsletters? They are trying to get on and off the subscription lists, maintaining their subscriptions, and receiving issues in their inboxes.

There is an executive summary of the report. There is a sample chapter as thumbnail pages.

The 165 design guidelines are in the report. There are tests of email newsletters. It’s not like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it’s like it We studied users in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom while conducting user testing in the United States. The user experience of receiving and reading newsletters was studied in 101 newsletters. The business and personal newsletters were the same.

The following newsletters were tested in the lab.

• AdAge.com: AdAge Daily (daily industry news)
• Allrecipes.com: Daily Dish (cooking advice)
• Bankrate.com: Frugal News (financial information)
• BNET: Business Tools for Busy Leaders (weekly management info)
• Cooking.com: All About Shopping (retail)
• Dictionary.com: Word of the Day (reference)
• The Economist: The World This Week (weekly news)
• Entertainment Weekly: EW Monitor (daily specialized news)
• Fodors.com (weekly travel advice)
• Handspring (consumer electronics customer newsletter)
• The Herman Group: Trend Alert (weekly consulting insights)
• ManhattanUsersGuide.com (daily local entertainment guide)
• Morningstar: Technology Bytes (twice-weekly investment advice)
• MSNBC: Breaking News Email (daily news)
• New York City Parks and Recreation: The Daily Plant (update from municipal department)
• New York Times: Books Update (weekly book reviews)
• Overstock.com: O-Mail (e-commerce)
• Site 59: Top Picks (travel deals)
• SmarterTravel.com: Last Minute Airfares (travel deals)
• USAToday.com: Daily Briefing (news headlines)
• WineLoversPage.com: The 30 Second Wine Advisor (weekly wine tips)
• Zacks.com: Profit from the Pros (investment advice)

Some users tested the remaining newsletters. The B2B newsletters were often so specialized that only a few study participants received them.

The report is well illustrated. There are 353 colorScreenshots. There are newsletters and subscribe/unsubscribe screens that worked well or caused problems in user testing. There are examples and best practices from 118 different newsletters. Some of the newsletters were not shown in the report.

Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary
   • User research
   • High nominal usability
   • Low perceived usability
   • Speed matters
   • Improving usability
   • Significant platform diversity
   • Spam is a fact of life
   • The battle for the inbox
   • Scannability and immediate utility
   • RSS/news feeds
   • Future of email newsletters
2. Overview of the Usability Studies
   • First study
   • Second study
   • Third study
   • About this report (third edition)
3. Email and Newsletters
   • Managing multiple accounts
   • People are overwhelmed with information
   • Email maintenance
   • Saving newsletters
   • Quality and efficiency matter
   • Newsletters are personal and social
   • Users are quick to jump to unfavorable conclusions
   • Users are fighting spam
   • A new way to unsubscribe
4. Using Newsletters
   • Benefits of email newsletters
   • The downside of newsletters
   • Signing up for newsletters
   • Selecting messages from the inbox
   • Skimming is reading
   • What users read
   • How often users read newsletters
   • Forwarding newsletters
5. Business Newsletters
   • Business relationships
   • Making or influencing business purchase decisions
   • Personalization in business newsletters
6. RSS (Real Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary)
7. Interpreting the Study Data
   • Amount of email and spam
   • Number of newsletters
   • Time to read newsletters
   • Time to subscribe and unsubscribe
   • Success rates
8. Subscription
   • Link name and placement
     • 11 design guidelines
   • Subscription process
     • 29 design guidelines
   • Confirming subscriptions
     • 10 design guidelines
   • Respecting subscribers
     • 2 design guidelines
9. Newsletter Content and Presentation
   • Most valuable newsletters
   • Least valuable newsletters
   • Frequency and delivery
     • 5 design guidelines
   • Sender and subject line
     • 6 design guidelines
   • Content and writing
     • 18 design guidelines
   • Presentation and design
     • 19 design guidelines
   • Links
     • 10 design guidelines
   • Other newsletter elements
     • 6 design guidelines
   • Encouraging new subscriptions
     • 5 design guidelines
   • Advertising
     • 3 design guidelines
10. Subscription Maintenance and Unsubscribing
    • Links and maintenance options
      • 12 design guidelines
    • Unsubscribe process
      • 11 design guidelines
11. How to Avoid Being Mistaken for Junk Mail
    • 12 guidelines from other sections in the report plus 2 additional design guidelines
12. RSS (News Feeds)
    • Promoting RSS news feeds
      • 9 design guidelines
    • News feed content
      • 7 design guidelines
13. Sites with Good Design Examples
14. Screenshots of Users’ Highly Rated Newsletters: Second and Third Studies
15. About the Sites Studied
16. About Participants
17. Methodology: First Study
    • Usage order
    • Session location
    • Test tasks and discussion
    • About using this methodology: First study
      • Telling users what to expect
      • Matching user interests
      • Phone call
      • Forwarding newsletters
      • Reading new newsletters
      • Scheduling and compensation
      • Unsubscribing
18. Methodology: Second study
    • Pilot study
    • Recruiting and participation
    • Sample email messages
    • About using this methodology: Second study
19. Methodology: Third Study
    • Pilot study
    • Recruiting and participation
    • Usage order
    • Tasks and questions
    • Field studies
    • About Using This Methodology: Third study
      • Using the eyetracking technology
      • Setting up inboxes
      • Accessing users’ email accounts
      • Matching users’ interests

What You Get

• Checklist of 165 specific design recommendations: review your subscription interface and your newsletter designs for these 165 best practices, and you will discover several things that need improvement.
  • The average website typically violates about half of our usability guidelines. You might have the one perfect site in the world that does everything right, but the odds are against you. It is safest to score your designs against a checklist of usability guidelines to make sure you don’t do anything wrong.
• Description of how people behave when subscribing, receiving email, and reading email, including extensive quotes (often colorful, because they were often annoyed). Learn from the users’ comments and reactions to common design mistakes in the newsletters we tested.
• 353 screenshots of email newsletters and subscriptions screens with descriptions of why they worked well for users or caused them problems in usability testing.
• $340,000 of user research at 0.1% of the cost.
• Test methodology description, allowing you to run your own user tests of your own newsletters.
• Knowledge to make your newsletter cut through customers’ information overload ; thus getting read more often. Avoid the negative reputation that follows from a newsletter that annoys users and feels like clutter instead of customer service.

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who is responsible for the design, implementation, or strategy for email newsletters.
• Newsletter editors.
• Internet marketing managers.

To collect comparative design lessons from hundreds of newsletters in multiple countries would cost about $340,000.

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