Email Newsletter Usability
- Toronto: Wednesday, August 11
Janelle Estes
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
- 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
Janelle Estes is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. Estes began her career as a
research associate on the Customer Experience team at Forrester Research, where she was involved with many research
efforts related to user experience and user-centered design. Additionally, Estes has worked as a user experience consultant
with companies across many industries, including retail, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and telecommunications.
Most recently, Estes worked at Chordiant Software as a Human Factors Engineer in an agile development environment. Estes
holds a B.S. in Information Design and Corporate Communication, and an M.S. in Human Factors in Information Design, both from Bentley College.
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