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Summary |
Users have highly emotional reactions to newsletters. This is in strong contrast to studies of website usability, where users are usually much more oriented towards functionality. Even a website that you visit daily will feel like a tool where you simply want to get in and get out. The positive emotional aspect of newsletters is that they can create much more of a bond between user and company than a website can. The negative aspect is that usability problems have much stronger impact on the customer relationship than they normally do. Users spend 51 seconds reading the average newsletter. The layout and writing both need superb usability to survive in the high-pressure environment of a crowded inbox. Averaged across our study, newsletters lost 19% of potential subscribers due to usability difficulties in their subscription processes and designs. People often stay subscribed to newsletters they don't want (cursing the sender with every new issue that clutters their inbox), so the unsubscribe process is also worth improving. Newsletters need to be smooth and easy: they must be seen to reduce the burdens of modern life. Even if free, the cost in e-mail clutter must be paid for by being helpful and relevant to users - and by communicating these benefits in a few characters in the subject line. This report shows what happened when real people used a broad set of real newsletters: trying to get on and off the subscription lists, maintaining their subscriptions, and receiving issues in their inboxes (sometimes opening the newsletters and sometimes scanning or reading them). > executive summary of the report The 199 design guidelines in the report are based on usability tests of 270 email newsletters. User testing was mainly conducted in the United States (in 12 states across the country) but we also studied users in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Most newsletters were studied in the users' own environment, focusing on the user experience of receiving and reading newsletters. These newsletters were about equally divided between business newsletters and personal newsletters. The following 45 newsletters were tested exhaustively in the usability lab:
The remaining newsletters were tested with a few users each. This is particularly true for the B2B newsletters which were often so specialized that only a few study participants received any given newsletter. The report is richly illustrated with 487 color screenshots of newsletters and subscribe/unsubscribe screens that worked well or caused problems in user testing, including eyetracking heatmaps showing where users looked when reading newsletters. The screenshots show examples and best practices from hundreds of different newsletters and websites. |
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Comparing the Editions |
If you already own the first or second edition of this report, should you buy the fourth edition? Probably yes, because the combined number of new findings in the third and fourth edition is substantial. If you own the third edition, we only recommend buying the fourth edition if e-mail newsletters are your main job focus or if you target mobile users. For people who are less heavily engaged in e-newsletters, there is no reason to spend time and money on the fourth edition if you have the third edition. The most important guidelines were included in the third edition and none of the findings in the third edition were invalidated in the fourth study. Comparison of the editions:
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Table of Contents |
586-page report
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What You Get |
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Who Should Read This Report? |
Running a similar series of usability studies yourself to collect comparative design lessons from hundreds of newsletters in multiple countries would cost about $400,000. Please help us continue publishing low-price reports by buying a site license if you have colleagues who will read the report. If you only need it for yourself, then that's obviously what the single-user license is for. If somebody "gives" you a copy, then please buy a download anyway to keep prices down in the future.
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 Tutorial |
| Full-day training course on the usability of email newsletters at the annual Usability Week conference. |