Email Newsletter Usability

"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."

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).

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 users in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom were also studied. 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 report is 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).

Click here for the executive summary, a sample chapter and to order the report.

Click here to read The Communication Initiative's trend summary of this report.