Nielsen Norman Group Report:

Email Newsletter Usability:
127 design guidelines for subscription interfaces, newsletter content and account maintenance based on user research

293 pages PDF format
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$298 for a single report, $498 for the report and the right to make copies within your organization. (No shipping/handling fees will be added: it's a download.)

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.

Averaged across our study, newsletters lost 22% 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).

> sample page
> sample chapter as thumbnail pages
> executive summary of the report

The 127 design guidelines in the report are based on usability tests of 111 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. 101 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 ten newsletters were tested more exhaustively in the usability lab, focusing on their subscription user interfaces as well as subscription management and the unsubscribe experience:

• Cooking.com: All About Shopping (retail)
• Dictionary.com: Word of the Day (reference)
• The Economist: The World This Week (weekly news)
• Entertainment Weekly: EW Monitor (daily specialized news)
• Handspring (consumer electronics customer newsletter)
• The Herman Group: Trend Alert (weekly consulting insights)
• Morningstar: Technology Bytes (twice-weekly investment advice)
• MSNBC: Breaking News Email (daily news)
• New York City Parks and Recreation: The Daily Plant (daily update from municipal department)
• Site 59: Top Picks (travel deals)

The report is richly illustrated with 165 color screenshots of newsletters and subscribe/unsubscribe screens that worked well or caused problems in user testing. The screenshots show examples and best practices from 65 different newsletters and websites. (111 newsletters were tested, but not all are shown in the report.)

Comparing the First and Second Editions

If you already own the first edition of this report, should you buy the second edition?

In all fairness, we can only recommend this if e-mail newsletters are one of your main job functions or if you publish a B2B newsletter. For people who are less heavily engaged in e-newsletters, there is no reason to spend time and money on the second edition if you have the first edition. The most important guidelines for subscription interfaces are included in the first edition and none of the findings in the first edition were invalidated in the second study.

Here's a short comparison of the first and second editions:

• Guidelines: increased from 79 to 127, with most of the new guidelines relating to the design and content of the newsletter itself. Very few new guidelines about the subscription interface.
• Page count: increased from 186 to 293
• Screenshots: increased from 109 to 165
• Newsletters tested: increased from 10 to 111
• Emphasis: changed from mainly B2C to about equal B2C and B2B

Table of Contents

293-page report

1. Executive summary
   • Spam is a fact of life
   • User research
   • High nominal usability
   • Low perceived usability
   • Speed matters
   • Significant platform diversity
   • Scannability and immediate utility
   • Future of email newsletters
2. Overview of the usability studies
   • Initial study
   • Second study
   • About this report (second edition)
3. Using newsletters
   • People are overwhelmed with information
   • Quality and efficiency matter
   • Skimming is reading
   • Reasons for not intending to read newsletters
   • Users are fighting spam
   • A new way to unsubscribe
   • Why users unsubscribed
   • Newsletters are personal and social
   • Users are quick to jump to unfavorable conclusions
4. Business newsletters
   • Business relationships
   • Making or influencing business purchase decisions
   • Personalization in business newsletters
5. Interpreting the study data
   • Amount of email and spam
   • Number of newsletters
   • Signing up for newsletters
   • User explanations of why they received newsletters they did not remember signing up for
   • Saving newsletters
   • Forwarding newsletters
   • Other newsletter values
     • Look forward to receiving
     • Routine part of schedule
     • Productivity
   • Time to subscribe and unsubscribe
   • Errors
   • Success rates
6. Recommended Newsletter Process
7. Design guidelines
8. Subscription
   • 47 design guidelines
9. Newsletter content and presentation
   • 59 design guidelines
   • Most valuable newsletters
   • Least valuable newsletters
     • Reasons for not valuing newsletters
   • Samples of usable subject and senders
     • Sender
     • Subject line (number of characters)
     • Site
10. Subscription maintenance and unsubscribing
    • 18 design guidelines
11. How to avoid being mistaken for junk mail
    • 3 design guidelines
12. Sites with good design examples
    • First study
    • Second study
13. Screenshots of users' highly rated newsletters: Second study
14. Newsletter evaluations: First study
15. Pros and cons of newsletters
    • Problems with email newsletters
    • User complaints about newsletters
    • Benefits of email newsletters
16. Advice from newsletter users
17. About the sites studied
    • Site selection and newsletter descriptions
18. About participants
    • First study
    • Second study
19. Methodology: First study
    • Usage order
    • Session location
    • Test tasks and discussion
    • About using this methodology: First study
    • Telling users what to expect
    • Matching user interests
    • Phone call
    • Forwarding newsletters
    • Reading new newsletters
    • Scheduling and compensation
    • Unsubscribing
20. Methodology: Second study
    • Pilot study
    • Recruiting and participation
    • Sample email messages
    • About using this methodology: Second study

What You Get

• Checklist of 127 specific design recommendations: review your website and your newsletter designs for these 127 best practices, and you will discover several things that need improvement.
  • The average website typically violates about half of our usability guidelines. You might have the one perfect site in the world that does everything right, but the odds are against you. It is safest to score your designs against a checklist of usability guidelines to make sure you don't do anything wrong.
• Description of how people behave when subscribing, receiving email, and reading email, including extensive quotes (often colorful, because they were often annoyed). Learn from the users' comments and reactions to common design mistakes in the newsletters we tested.
• 165 screenshots of subscription processes and email newsletters with descriptions of why they worked well for users or caused them problems in usability testing.
• $240,000 of user research at 0.1% of the cost.
• Test methodology description, allowing you to run your own user tests of your own newsletters.
• Knowledge to make your newsletter cut through customers' information overload; thus getting read more often. Avoid the negative reputation that follows from a newsletter that annoys users and feels like clutter instead of customer service.

Who Should Read This Report?

• Anybody who is responsible for the design, implementation, or strategy for email newsletters.
• Newsletter editors.
• Internet marketing managers.

Running a similar series of usability studies yourself to collect comparative design lessons from a large number of newsletters in multiple countries would cost about $240,000.

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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