Usability Week 2009
San Francisco
Jun 22-27		 New York
Jul 13-17		 Sydney
Jul 27-Aug 1		 Edinburgh
Sep 14-18

Email Newsletter Usability

  • San Francisco: Thursday, June 25
  • New York: Not offered
  • Sydney: Not offered
  • Edinburgh: Not offered

Amy Schade
Full-Day Tutorial

If executed poorly, email newsletters can hurt rather than help your customer relations. In this full-day tutorial, we’ll explore the many requirements for creating an effective email newsletter, from timing to crafting text and subject lines.
This seminar is based on:

  • Three separate usability studies of more than 200 newsletters (both general-interest and B2B)
  • Testing of numerous RSS feeds
  • Results from our recent eyetracking research on newsletters, and subscription processes

Our insights, best practices, and guidelines draw extensively from Nielsen Norman Group’s research, including how to lead users through the subscription process, and making content more readable. In this tutorial, we’ll draw on those findings to discuss the subtleties of the email newsletter form itself, and also talk in-depth about our more than 150 newsletter usability guidelines.

Course Outline:

  • Study details
    • Study overviews
    • Methodologies and tasks
    • Measurements and ratings
    • Participants
    • Newsletters studied
    • Study measurements
  • How people use and think about email newsletters
    • Success rates for subscribing and unsubscribing
    • Amount of email users receive
    • Discovering new newsletters
    • Characteristics of valuable newsletters
    • Saving and forwarding newsletters
    • Impact of spam and unsolicited newsletters
  • Subscription process
    • Link name and placement
    • Newsletter names and descriptions
    • Collecting information from users
    • Confirming subscriptions
    • Streamlining the subscription process
  • Newsletter content and presentation
    • Timing: how often and when to send
    • Senders
    • Subject lines
    • Content selection
    • Reading behavior
    • Writing headlines and blurbs
    • Editing content
    • Prioritizing information
    • Keeping content fresh
    • Advertising
    • Encouraging new subscriptions
  • Subscription maintenance and unsubscribing
    • Unsubscribe links
    • Maintenance options: what to offer and how
    • Unsubscribe process
    • How to confirm email newsletter cancellation
  • Spam and email newsletters
    • Effect of spam on newsletters
    • Spam-blocking tools
  • RSS and news feeds
    • Awareness and usage
    • How people read news feeds
    • Relationship between RSS and newsletters
  • Tips for usability testing your email newsletter
    • Recruiting the right users
    • Lessons learned from the studies

Format:

Full-day tutorial with lecture, discussion, video highlights from user testing, and exercises.

Handouts:

Copies of the presentation slides plus a free copy of Nielsen Norman Group’s full research report on email newsletter usability (retail value of this report: US$398).

Who Should Attend:

Anyone who designs, edits, or writes email newsletters, as well as anyone responsible for a company’s email outreach or marketing strategy.

Instructor:

photo of Amy Schade Amy Schade is a Director based in Nielsen Norman Group’s East Coast office. Schade has worked with clients internationally in music, insurance, travel, banking, education, and e-commerce industries, and has conducted user testing and performed reviews on a wide variety of websites and intranets in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She presents tutorials and workshops on user testing, intranet usability, writing for the Web, and email newsletter usability. She co-authored the NN/g reports on intranet usability, intranet information architecture, email newsletters, and site map usability, and has conducted many of the user test sessions for reports on accessibility and usability for senior citizens. Before joining NN/g, Schade was an information architect at Arc eConsultancy, where she created and revised architectures for sites ranging from a family-related content site to a transaction-based sponsorship marketplace. Schade has also held various positions in Web production and advertising. She has an Masters degree from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.