Email Newsletter Usability from Nielsen Norman Group Report
Nielsen Norman Group Report on email newsletter usability is out. For your convenience, I had read and summarised the findings for 3 different type of people involve in email newsletter.
Users
Users have highly emotional reactions to them because they arrive in users’ inboxes.
Users will often avoid signing up for newsletters because they feel crushed by information overload. It is the job of the newsletter publisher to convince users that the newsletter will be simple, useful, and easy to deal with.
Why users liked email newsletters, more than one-third highlighted the following three benefits:
* Email newsletters are informative and keep users up-to-date (mentioned by two-thirds of the users).
* Email newsletters are convenient and are delivered straight to the user’s information central; they then require no further action beyond a simple click.
* Email newsletters have timely information and real-time delivery.
Designers
This is nothing new for professional like us but good to know if you are relatively new
“Each email platform has a different way of displaying the From line, the Subject line, and the newsletter content. They also have different approaches to spam filtering and other things that influence the subscriber’s user experience.This diversity makes it crucial that newsletter designers test their subscribe and unsubscribe processes—as well as the actual newsletter delivery and display—on all major email platforms.”
Content Provider/Client
Most frequent advice our study participants had for newsletter creators was to “keep it brief.”
Writing good subject lines is crucial, both in encouraging users to open the newsletter and helping them distinguish the newsletter from spam. We recommend including content from the issue in each subject line, even though it’s a difficult job to write good microcontent within the fifty- to sixty-character limit that many email services impose.
