According to trends traced in this article, email newsletters continue to be one of the most important ways to communicate on the Internet. They can be a tool for building relationships; for example, users can forward relevant newsletters to friends and colleagues. However, a 2004 study shows that users are highly critical of newsletters that waste their time, and often ignore or delete newsletters that have insufficient usability. The upshot of these results is that layout and content scannability are paramount.

Specifically, the USA-based Nielsen Norman Group used a diary methodology to test participants from 12 states across the USA, along with users in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Researchers studied 101 of the 345 newsletters that participants were already subscribed to on their own initiative, testing users' newsletter experiences over a 4-week period in most cases, and a 2-week period in a few cases.

Some of the factors that influence whether and to what extent a reader might access an e-newsletter include:

In conclusion, when users were asked to describe the benefits of email newsletters, 3 reasons stood out, each being highlighted by more than one-third of users:

Click here for the full article in Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox.

Click here to read The Communication Initiative's summary of Jakob Nielsen's "Email Newsletter Usability".

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Jakob Nielsen

Nielsen Norman Group

Nielsen Norman Group site