Jaokob Nielsen's most recent newsletter was about newsletter usability. His main findings are:

• The process of subscribing and unsubscribing is getting easier
• the average time spent “reading” a newsletter is 51 seconds
• the blah-blah text intro is skipped by more than two thirds of readers
• eye-tracking test show the most read parts are the first 2 words of each headline
• stored newsletters in inboxes become part of users' information spaces and thus will be found when they search their own environments

He also mentions RSS and suggest calling them “news feeds” as 82% have never heard of them. He concludes that feeds are a “cold medium”, and that they do not form the same relationships as newsletters. He also estimates newsletter subscribers generate 10 times as much revenue as feed subscribers.


newsletters: cut out the blah-blah text, no one reads it!

One last word about newlsetters not in Jakob's highly informative piece: “open rates” (the percentage of people who open the newsletter they receive in their inbox) are going down according to this ExactTarget study (registration required):
email open rates were 35.5% in 2005, down 16.5% from 2004.

The good news is that click-through rates (percenage of readers who click on a link in the newsletter) remained unchanged at around 6.6%. There's just fewer of them.

Still, Jakob maintains that newsletters are the “best way to maintain customer relationships” and as usual I tend to agree with him.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 9:45 am and is filed under Internet Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.