Email newsletters can be used to regularly engage with your most important audiences. In this course, we’ll explore guidelines for creating an effective email newsletter, such as: How to design a usable subscription process, what content to include, and how to create an easy-to-read newsletter that can be accessed from any device.

This course draws extensively from over 200 guidelines derived from Nielsen Norman Group’s five separate studies on email newsletters.

Benefits

• Understand how users manage email and email newsletters on various devices
• Review techniques for creating engaging and easy-to-read newsletters accessible from any device
• Learn how to streamline the subscription and unsubscribing processes

Topics covered

• How we collected our data
  • Methodologies and tasks
  • Participants
  • Types of newsletters studied
• How people use email and email newsletters
  • Managing email and email newsletters
  • Reading newsletters on various devices
  • Discovering new newsletters
  • Saving and forwarding newsletters
  • Impact of spam and unsolicited newsletters
  • Personal newsletters (B2C) vs. business-related (B2B) newsletters
• Subscription process
  • Link name and placement
  • Newsletter names and descriptions
  • Collecting information from users
  • Confirming subscriptions
  • Encouraging new subscriptions
• Frequency and delivery
• Sender information, subject lines, and pre-headers
• Content
  • Content selection
  • Voice and tone
  • Personalization
  • Keeping content fresh
  • Hyperlinks
  • Images and videos
  • Advertising
• Layout and visual design
• Subscription maintenance and unsubscribing
  • Unsubscribe links
  • Maintenance options
  • Unsubscribe process
  • How to confirm email newsletter cancellation

Format

The course is mainly in lecture format with a couple of group exercises to reinforce the learned principles and guidelines.

The course also includes:

• Findings from our own usability studies, including eyetracking
• Videos from usability testing of people's behavior in response to newsletters
• Screenshots of newsletters that work and don’t work
• Opportunities to ask questions and get answers