Study: There is Hope for Email Newsletters

[Brittany]

A study by Nielsen Norman Group (NNG), which was co-founded by usability expert Jakob Nielsen, has shown that many email newsletter subscribers are beginning to understand the difference between their newsletter subscriptions and unsolicited email known as spam.

However, the study, dubbed “Email Newsletter Usability, 2nd Edition,” also shows that these same subscribers now expect more from their newsletter subscriptions. If the newsletters fail to deliver valuable content, they’ll end up in the same “Deleted Items” folder as those nasty spam emails.

“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 study finds. “The negative aspect is that usability problems have a much stronger impact on the customer relationship than they normally do.”

Nielsen, whom the New York Times has called “the guru of Web page usability,” conducted a similar study in 2002, which showed that only about 23% of all email newsletters are read thoroughly by subscribers.

Furthermore, while subscribers responded better and more emotionally to the “personal” feel of newsletters as opposed to the anonymity of websites, many subscribers had trouble distinguishing between their newsletter subscriptions and spam.

Back then, the future for email newsletters seemed dim. Spam continues to have a negative impact today, but as subscribers become more web-savvy, Nielsen is optimistic.

He does warn, however, that the future of email newsletters remains on the shoulders of those sending the newsletters.

Want to keep your company’s newsletters out of the trash bin? Make sure your email newsletters must be short and to-the-point, delivering content quickly and clearly, without providing information overload.

Otherwise, the newsletters may very easily become buried in an avalanche of spam.

You may download a full report here.

[orinoco]

I have a moderately successful site and I was sending out a newsletter to 1000s of users a week. Then in January I received a message from the ISP stating that if I did not spamming then I'd be dropped. It seemed that the following had happened:

(1) people who had signed up for the newsletter had maliciously or unintentionally flagged the messages as spam
(2) my competitors had signed up for the newsletter and triggered spam traps
(3) AOL's spam traps were easily offended by their usership's spam reports

Hastily I retreated from the email newsletter, and moved to an RSS/XML newsletter feed. If people want it, they can get it, and I have no more worries about being tagged as a spammer.

As far as I could see the newsletter had become kind of irrelevant before this anyway, because more and more people could not deal with the information overload in their inboxes and therefore were deleting the newsletter without really reading it.

In relaunching as an RSS I went to a more punchy style with less text and more headlines. So far this seems to be a success.

p.

[MarComm1]

"Want to keep your company’s newsletters out of the trash bin? Make sure your email newsletters must be short and to-the-point, delivering content quickly and clearly, without providing information overload.

Otherwise, the newsletters may very easily become buried in an avalanche of spam."

I agree with Brittany, and that's why I enjoy WebProWorld and WebProNews, they are short and to the point. I try to keep my companies e-newsletter equally as concise, however it is still being blocked out by some anti-spam filters, any suggestions.

[brianzajac]

This is very true Brittany. Newsletters are an essential part of an online service/product support for existing clients. However, once factor is on focus for your user base. For example, let's take a look at WebProWorld. I seem to get newsletters twice if not three times a week. While this may be good for all the crazy changes in the search engines, it might not be suitable for the general audience. To me, if you continue to create newsletters this way, you might lose quite a bit of your audience. Bottom line: no one wants to read anything that much unless they are trully in the business of doing so. So, filtering your audience might be a key to your newsletter success.