Research Update: Timely, Relevant Newsletters Thrive

(E-WRITE)Are you discouraged by your newsletter’s flat—or maybe declining—open rate? Perhaps you’re wondering whether your newsletter is worth the effort. Do your subscribers find it relevant? Have blogs and news feeds made newsletters obsolete?
Newsletters do face unprecedented competition for their subscribers’ time, but there is good news from the Nielsen Norman Group’s (NN/g) usability research. The best of them—those newsletters that are relevant and timely—have bright futures and are powerful marketing tools.

Newsletters are powerful, says NN/g, because they establish a personal connection and an ongoing relationship with subscribers. But subscribers are fickle. They will transfer their allegiance to your competitor’s newsletter if it better serves their needs. So how do you attract subscribers and maintain their loyalty?  NN/g has some practical and concrete advice.

Make Subscribing A Snap
Subscribing should be quick and easy—no more than two minutes and ideally under a minute. NN/g found that the subscribe function had a high completion rate--81%. But streamlining the process so everyone completes the task means that you can boost subscriptions by almost one-fifth.

Write “Must Open Now” Subject Lines
Write an “informative and enticing” subject line to get readers to open the newsletter now, rather than archive it, explains NN/g.  Many archived newsletters are never read.

Here’s a subject line that we think says must open: “New E-Mail Metrics: Open and Click Rates.” This subject line says that the contents are timely, important and specific.

Write Scannable Text
It’s no news that online readers scan rather than read word-for-word. But writing scannable text is “about 50% more important for newsletters” than websites, concludes NN/g.  Scannability is “essential for a newsletter’s survival.”

That’s in part because readers don’t have time to read a lot of text. NN/g tracked users’ eye movements and found that users spent an average of 51 seconds reading a newsletter and an additional 33 seconds following newsletter links.

To make it easy for your readers to scan:

1. Write information-packed message headlines. Many readers skim headlines to get the gist of the newsletter. Some only scan the words at the beginning of the headline. So front-load the beginning of your headline with the most important words.
   
   
2. Write short sentences and paragraphs. Short sentences written in the active voice are easier to scan. Make sure the first sentence of the paragraph previews the content. Many readers skim by reading the first sentence in a paragraph or section.
   
   
3. Write concisely. The most frequent advice study participants had for newsletter creators was to keep it brief: