Executive Summary
The most significant finding from our usability research on email newsletters is that
users have highly emotional reactions to them. This is in strong contrast to research
on website usability, where users are usually much more oriented toward
functionality. Even a website that users visit daily seems to feel like a tool: users
want to get in and get out as quickly as possible rather than “connect” with the site.
Users tend to glance at websites when they need to accomplish something or to find
the answer to a specific question. In contrast, newsletters feel personal because they
arrive in users’ inboxes, and users have an ongoing relationship with them.
Newsletters also have a social aspect, as users often forward them to colleagues and
friends.
The positive aspect of this emotional relationship is that newsletters can create much
more of a bond between users and a company than a website can. The negative
aspect is that newsletter usability problems have a much stronger impact on the
customer relationship than website usability problems.
For example, in one of our studies, a user received an error message that read
“Email address is not valid.” This would be a poorly worded error message in any
user interface, but the emotional aspect to newsletters increased the user's anger:
“Mine’s as valid as the next person's! ... It's questioning my validity as an entity in
cyberspace.”
Sixty-nine percent of users said that they look forward to receiving at least one
newsletter, and most users said a newsletter had become part of their routine. Very
few other promotional efforts can claim this degree of customer buy-in.
USER RESEARCH
To assess how people use email newsletters, we conducted three rounds of user
studies, as well as pilot studies to refine the test methodology. In total, ninety-three
users participated in our testing. Most participants were in the United States (in
twelve states across the country), but we also studied users in Australia, Hong Kong,
Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
The first study focused on testing newsletter usability in terms of subscribing,
unsubscribing, and maintaining the user’s account. For this study, we systematically
tested ten different newsletters, which we assigned to users to ensure that they
hadn’t previously used a newsletter’s subscription interface. Most of the study was
conducted as a traditional laboratory test: we observed users individually as they
read newsletters and attempted to subscribe and unsubscribe. We conducted
additional parts of the study remotely, through telephone calls.
We conducted our second study remotely, using a diary methodology that allowed us
a much wider geographical distribution of participants. The second study included all
of our international participants and all of our U.S. users who were not on the East
Coast. The first study had the benefit of systematically testing a set of design
variations, with multiple users for each design. However, it also had the distinct
disadvantage of people getting newsletters that they had not selected themselves.
For the second study, we looked in detail at users’ experience receiving and reading
newsletters that they’d already subscribed to on their own initiative. In total, the
participants subscribed to 345 different newsletters, and we studied 101 of those.
We studied users’ newsletter experience over a four-week period for most
participants, and over two weeks in a few cases.
This longitudinal approach allowed more emphasis on how people deal with incoming
newsletters during their workday. We were also able to test many more B2B and
intranet newsletters than we could cover in the first study, which mainly tested B2C
newsletters. Of the newsletters received by the users in our second study, 65% were
for personal purposes and 40% were for business purposes (users viewed 5% of
newsletters as both personal and business, so we counted those twice).
We conducted the third study using an eyetracker. Eyetracking let us record where
users were looking on websites as they subscribed or unsubscribed. We also
recorded how users looked at their inboxes and how they read individual newsletters.
During the third study, we systematically tested twelve newsletters (using a
controlled methodology to ensure that all newsletters were used evenly) and tested
forty newsletters in a less controlled manner (users were free to pick newsletters of
interest from an inbox, so some newsletters were read much more than others).
Finally, we tracked users’ eye movements as they read a total of sixty-five
newsletters from their personal inboxes. By definition, each of those newsletters was
read by only a single user.
In addition to studying newsletters, the third study included a component in which
people used a variety of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) readers to read news feeds.
This let us compare the newer medium of feeds with newsletters, which are now an
established media form.
Finally, our third round of research included a field-study component in which we
observed users in their offices during a normal workday. This ethnographic approach
let us learn about the use of newsletters and news feeds in an environment with
many competing information sources and demands on users’ time.
HIGH NOMINAL USABILITY
Our test users experienced unprecedentedly high levels of task completion in their
attempts to subscribe and unsubscribe to the newsletters in the study: 81% for
subscribing and 91% for unsubscribing in our most recent study.
Although high, these rates could still be improved. If, for example, a newsletter with
50,000 subscribers ensured that everyone could correctly operate its subscription
interface, it could add an estimated 11,700 subscribers on average.
Still, most usability studies find success rates of around 66% for other Web design
areas.1 Clearly, relative to this, the newsletter usability success rates are incredibly
high—even though they’re still lower than anything we would deem a truly great user
experience.
There are probably two reasons for the high success rates here. First, the tested
functionality is very simple: Get on or off a mailing list. In fact, the main failures
came on websites that complicated this functionality, such as by combining
newsletter subscriptions with site registration. In general, it’s easier to design a
simple user interface when the underlying functionality is simple.
The second reason that the subscription process had much better usability than
other Web designs is that newsletter designs are highly accountable. In many other
Web design areas, project managers can delude themselves and their bosses that
user-hostile designs, such as splash pages, offer some benefits. Create a design
where people can’t find what they want and page views might even go up as users
wander aimlessly before they leave (and give up doing business with the company).
With a newsletter subscription design, users either subscribe or they don’t. In the
latter case, websites will eventually tone down their design excesses and focus on
simplicity, and subscriptions will increase accordingly. If a site were to replace a
simple design with a complex one, it would soon notice a decline in new
subscriptions and revert to the previous design, writing off the bad design as an
expensive usability lesson.
LOW PERCEIVED USABILITY
Even though users successfully unsubscribed 91% of the time during the test
sessions, they often refrained from even trying to get off mailing lists that they no
longer wanted to receive.
The four main reasons people didn’t attempt to unsubscribe were:
Emotional attachment to the newsletter: Users said that it didn’t feel good to
sever the relationship, even when they no longer read the mailings.
Low expectations for the website’s usability: People assumed that it would be
difficult and time-consuming to unsubscribe, so they postponed the job for
another day and simply deleted the newsletter’s current issue.
Fear that unsubscribing would fail and would subject the user to even more
mail: Many people have heard that asking to get off spam lists only confirms
the validity of their email address to the spammers; this notion has become
an urban legend that contaminates users’ mental model of legitimate
newsletter publishers as well.
Easier options: It’s often easier to simply use a spam-blocking feature to stop
future issues than it is to unsubscribe.
Whatever the reason, it’s clear that mailing list owners shouldn’t assume that all
subscribers actually want to receive their newsletters. Many users might have simply
neglected to unsubscribe.
Some newsletters deliberately make it difficult to unsubscribe by hiding the
instructions or making them overly complex. The motive is probably to retain as
many subscribers as possible to maximize the reach of permission marketing
programs. In reality, however, you don’t have users’ “permission” once they stop
wanting the newsletter, regardless of whether they jump through the hoops required
to get off the list. If users keep getting unwanted newsletters, the messages will
start to backfire and become regular reminders that they’re annoyed with your
company. Better to let them go.
SPEED MATTERS
In our latest study, the subscribe process took 4 minutes, and the unsubscribe
process took 1.5 minutes. Even though these task times are not prohibitive, they’re
much too long for the simple functionality involved.
We recommend setting a usability goal of allowing an existing user to unsubscribe in
less than a minute, assuming that the user has a recent copy of the newsletter at
hand. New subscriptions should also take less than a minute when subscription
requires only the user's email address. Even if additional information is required,
users should be able to subscribe to free newsletters in less than 2 minutes. Only
newsletters that involve a subscription fee should be allowed so many steps that the
average user can’t subscribe in 2 minutes.
Users are very demanding with respect to the efficiency of operations like
subscribing or unsubscribing. For both tasks, we found extremely strong correlations
between the task time and the users’ subjective satisfaction: r = -.63 and -.95,
respectively.
These correlations basically say that the slower the subscribe or unsubscribe process,
the less people will like the site. For each additional minute it takes to subscribe, you
will lose 0.3 satisfaction points on a 1 to 7 scale, and for each additional minute it
takes to unsubscribe, you will lose 0.6 satisfaction points. As indicated by the
numbers, users are substantially more critical of a slow unsubscribe process. Once
they want out, they want out quickly.
A perfect satisfaction rating of 7 would require instantaneous task performance
according to the regression estimates. It seems impossible to create a design that
allows users to subscribe and unsubscribe in 0 seconds, but that’s ultimately what
users want. It's nobody’s goal in life to “manage subscriptions,” so any overhead
becomes an annoyance. Extreme simplicity and ease of use are necessary to make a
positive impact on customers.
IMPROVING USABILITY
In our first study, the average time to subscribe was 5 minutes. Only four years
later, the average time for this task had dropped to 4 minutes. It’s also faster to
unsubscribe: this task time dropped from 3 minutes in the first study to 1.5 minutes
four years later.
These are substantial improvements in usability over a fairly short time, showing
that companies are investing resources in advancing the newsletter user experience.
The improvements in getting off mailing lists are particularly impressive. In part, this
might be because companies have recognized that there are no benefits in
continuing to annoy customers who don’t want their newsletters. But the emphasis
on easier unsubscribe features is more likely due to legislation that requires
companies to provide users with more information about how to stop receiving email.
SIGNIFICANT PLATFORM DIVERSITY
The Web is a fairly uniform environment. Almost all users have either Internet
Explorer or Firefox, and almost all run these browsers on Windows. Yes, a few people
use Macs and browsers like Safari or Opera, but each browsing environment offers
pretty much the same features. The differences between Web browsing platforms are
like the differences between Indian and African elephants, not like those between
crabs and eagles.
In contrast, email newsletters must contend with platform diversity that is much
more like the biodiversity of the Cretaceous Period (before the comet hit). Although
Yahoo! was the most commonly used email reader in our recent study, it accounted
for only 31% of users. Eight additional platforms were represented, but people also
commonly use others, including Eudora, Lotus Notes, and a variety of mainframe
systems and Unix mail variants.
Each email platform has a different way of displaying the From line, the Subject line,
and the newsletter content. They also have different approaches to spam filtering
and other things that influence the subscriber’s user experience. This diversity makes
it crucial that newsletter designers test their subscribe and unsubscribe processes—
as well as the actual newsletter delivery and display—on all major email platforms.
SPAM IS A FACT OF LIFE
There’s a little good news (but mostly bad news) about the impact of spam on email
newsletters. The good news is that users in our recent studies were better able to
differentiate legitimate opt-in newsletters from unsolicited messages than they could
in the past. In our earlier newsletter usability studies, users sometimes confused the
two. Now, spam has a very prominent profile in terms of popular awareness, press
coverage, and the sheer amount of it hitting inboxes. Users have thus developed a
reasonable understanding of the spam phenomenon as opposed to simply being
baffled about unexpected messages.
The bad news is that the increased burden on email users has caused people to
become even more stressed and impatient when processing their inbox. Users have
less tolerance for newsletters that waste their time.
We have also found that people often use their spam filters as a shortcut to
eliminating newsletters they no longer want. Instead of unsubscribing, which users
often view as too cumbersome, they simply tell their spam-blocker that the
newsletter is spam. Voila, that newsletter no longer shows up in the inbox.
The fact that many users will declare a newsletter to be spam when they tire of it
has terrifying implications: legitimate newsletters might get blacklisted and thus be
undeliverable to other subscribers who still welcome new issues. This is a compelling
reason to increase the usability of the unsubscribe process: better to lose a
subscriber than to be listed as spam.
THE BATTLE FOR THE INBOX
Users are getting pickier and pickier about which newsletters they’ll read. Some are
purposefully cutting back on the number of newsletters they receive. These users
view newsletters as being in direct competition with each other for a limited number
of slots in the inbox. Users will unsubscribe from a newsletter or stop reading it—
even if it’s good—if they come across a different one on the same topic that better
serves their needs.
People get a lot of email. They don't have time to read a lot of text. In our most
recent study, users spent an average of 51 seconds on each of the newsletters they
read from their own inbox. Users spent an additional 33 seconds on information
found by pursuing newsletter links to websites.
Not only do you have to compete with other newsletters to get people to subscribe,
you must compete with all other email and get users to open your messages, pay
attention to your content, and click through to your site. This has always been true,
but the competition is becoming more intense as users are getting more swamped by
online information sources than they were in the past.
Email services are offering increasing amounts of storage space, often in the
gigabyte range. This allows users to save more old newsletters than was possible in
the past. On the one hand, having users archive your newsletter means that it
becomes a form of permanent outreach and will show up when they search their
personal information space. On the other hand, many newsletters might be saved
and never read. It’s worth it to use informative and enticing subject lines that
encourage users to read a newsletter while it’s fresh.
SCANNABILITY AND IMMEDIATE UTILITY
The most frequent complaint in our study was about newsletters that arrived too
often. And, when we let them vent, the most frequent advice our study participants
had for newsletter creators was to “keep it brief.”
Newsletters must be designed to facilitate scanning. In our first study, 23% of the
newsletters were read thoroughly. In our third study, four years later, only 19% of
the newsletters were read thoroughly. The drop in percentage of thoroughly read
newsletters is a good indication of the increased volume of email that users have to
process.
The dominant mode of dealing with email newsletters is to skim them: that’s what
happened to 69% of the newsletters in our most recent study. Of the remaining
newsletters, users only glanced at them or at most read a few items.
Sometimes users will simply skim the headlines to get an update or overview of
what’s going on in the field covered by the newsletter. As one user said, “I like to
keep up-to-date in the industry, but rarely delve deeper than the cover page.” Other
times, users deliberately pick out those few elements that are most important to
them and ignore the rest. As another user said, “I review the contents by company
and only read the companies of interest to me.”
Designing for users who scan rather than read is essential for a newsletter’s survival.
Scannability is important for websites as well, but it’s about 50% more important for
newsletters. This implies the need for layouts that let users quickly grasp each
issue’s content and zero in on specifics. Content and writing styles must support
users who read only part of the material.
Newsletters must be current and timely, as indicated by three of the four main
reasons that users listed for why a certain newsletter was the most valuable they
received. All of the following four reasons were given by more than 40% of users:
Informs of work-related news or company actions (mentioned by two-thirds
of users)
Reports prices/sales
Informs about personal interests/hobbies
Informs about events/deadlines/important dates
There is pretty much a “what have you done for me lately” phenomenon at play,
where newsletters have to justify their space in the inbox on a daily basis. Having
been relevant in the past is not enough. Because of the immediacy of the medium,
newsletters must be relevant today and address users’ specific needs in the moment.
Because newsletters build relationships with readers and because it’s so easy to
ignore individual issues, newsletters do get some leeway if they are predictably
relevant at certain times. During those periods when a newsletter isn’t relevant to
the user’s immediate needs, the user might simply ignore it rather than unsubscribe.
For example, a speech pathologist at an elementary school said that she could only
purchase new products at the end of the school year, and so ignored product-related
newsletters most of the year. Still, she didn’t unsubscribe, and simply receiving the
sales newsletters reminded her of the brand when she received her budget.
Users will often avoid signing up for newsletters because they feel crushed by
information overload. It is the job of the newsletter publisher to convince users that
the newsletter will be simple, useful, and easy to deal with.
A predictable publication frequency that is not too aggressive is usually best, except
for newsletters that report breaking news. A regular publication schedule lets users
know when to look for the newsletter and reduces the probability that they’ll confuse
it with spam and delete it.
Also, writing good subject lines is crucial, both in encouraging users to open the
newsletter and helping them distinguish the newsletter from spam. We recommend
including content from the issue in each subject line, even though it's a difficult job
to write good microcontent within the fifty- to sixty-character limit that many email
services impose.
RSS/NEWS FEEDS
The first, and strongest, guideline about news feeds is to stop calling them RSS. In
our most recent study, 82% of users had no idea what this term referred to. In
general, it’s typically wrong to use implementation-oriented terminology, because
most users don’t understand the underlying technology and don’t care about it. It’s
better to use terms that indicate what the concept does for users, and “news feeds”
does this far better than “RSS.”
Some users were familiar with the general idea of feeds, even if they didn’t know the
term “RSS.” This was typically because they were receiving feeds on their My Yahoo!
page or a similar personalized portal.
Users had very mixed feelings about feeds. Some people liked viewing information
from multiple sites in a single centralized location instead of having to go to each
site. Some users also liked scanning a list of headlines without seeing any content
that they didn’t ask for. A final benefit some users appreciated was the ability to
determine when they would go and view their news items. This is in contrast with
newsletter arrival times, which users can’t control.
On the other hand, many users had negative feelings about feeds. People who are
already suffering from information overload resent having to go to yet another
source of information. In contrast, email newsletters arrive in a tool that people
already use, so they don’t add yet another thing for over-burdened users to do.
Email is also easier to archive for later use, whereas feeds have an ephemeral
nature.
Several participants in our study had stopped using the feeds on their My Yahoo!
page. Many previous studies have found that users are reluctant to spend time
customizing portals, so it’s not surprising that some users simply decided to stop
looking at that part of the page rather than edit their preference settings.
Finally, some users resented the fact that news feeds are divorced from the context
of the publisher’s website. These users preferred the serendipity that came from
visiting a full-fledged website that offered options beyond the current headlines.
News feeds are definitely not for everybody, and they’re not a replacement for email
newsletters. Feeds can supplement newsletters for sites that cater to users who
prefer a centralized view of headlines. These are primarily newspaper sites and other
sites with a heavy focus on news and breaking stories, as well as sites that target
Internet enthusiasts. For sites that target mainstream business users or a broad
consumer audience, news feeds may be less important. Such sites might be better
off emphasizing higher-quality newsletters and a choice of publication frequency.
Also, our eyetracking of users reading news feeds showed that people scan headlines
and blurbs in feeds even more ruthlessly than they scan newsletters. When you
appear in somebody’s news reader, your site has a diminutive footprint that’s
rubbing shoulders with a flood of headlines from many other sites. Under these
conditions, users often read only the first two words of a headline, so it’s crucial to
have brief headlines and to start them with the most information-carrying words.
Feeds are a cold medium in comparison with email newsletters. Feeds don’t form the
same relationship between company and customers that a good newsletter can build.
We don’t have data to calculate the relative business value of a newsletter subscriber
compared to a feeds subscriber, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that
companies make ten times as much money from each newsletter subscriber. Given
that newsletters are a warmer and much more powerful medium, it is probably best
for most companies to encourage newsletter subscriptions and promote them over
feeds on their website.
FUTURE OF EMAIL NEWSLETTERS
Four years ago, in our first report about newsletter usability, we said about the
future of email newsletters: “There may be none. Legitimate use of email is at war
with spam, and spam may be winning.”
Although four years is a very short period in which to assess big trends, we now
believe that this assessment was too negative. Email newsletters are so powerful
that the best of them do have a future, despite ever-more adverse conditions.
Ever-increasing information overload is definitely making users reluctant to sign up
for more email. And once newsletters arrive in the user’s inbox, they might simply be
deleted as part of the ruthless mass deletion procedure aimed at the morning’s
spam. Finally, as discussed above, fear of spam and other email abuse is keeping
users from dealing rationally with newsletter subscriptions.
When we asked users why they liked email newsletters, more than one-third
highlighted the following three benefits:
Email newsletters are informative and keep users up-to-date (mentioned by
two-thirds of the users).
Email newsletters are convenient and are delivered straight to the user’s
information central; they then require no further action beyond a simple click.
Email newsletters have timely information and real-time delivery.
Newsletters that leverage these advantages (along with other points that users
mentioned) have a stable future. But they must continually deliver specific benefits
that help users with life or work issues in the here and now.
Comparing email newsletters with other media, one user said:
“Bottom line, I’d
rather have it in an email newsletter than in the regular mail. I can click Delete if I
don’t want it; I don’t have to throw anything away; and it is usually easier to
unsubscribe if you don’t want to get anymore.”
Convenience rules.
This is one of the few times we have found that the virtual world was better and
more convenient than the physical world. Usually, websites have such poor usability
that they compare very unfavorably with real-world stores or in-person services and
communities. In contrast, email newsletters have a very strong position.
Executive Summary
The most significant finding from our usability research on email newsletters is that
users have highly emotional reactions to them. This is in strong contrast to research
on website usability, where users are usually much more oriented toward
functionality. Even a website that users visit daily seems to feel like a tool: users
want to get in and get out as quickly as possible rather than “connect” with the site.
Users tend to glance at websites when they need to accomplish something or to find
the answer to a specific question. In contrast, newsletters feel personal because they
arrive in users’ inboxes, and users have an ongoing relationship with them.
Newsletters also have a social aspect, as users often forward them to colleagues and
friends.
The positive aspect of this emotional relationship is that newsletters can create much
more of a bond between users and a company than a website can. The negative
aspect is that newsletter usability problems have a much stronger impact on the
customer relationship than website usability problems.
For example, in one of our studies, a user received an error message that read
“Email address is not valid.” This would be a poorly worded error message in any
user interface, but the emotional aspect to newsletters increased the user's anger:
“Mine’s as valid as the next person's! ... It's questioning my validity as an entity in
cyberspace.”
Sixty-nine percent of users said that they look forward to receiving at least one
newsletter, and most users said a newsletter had become part of their routine. Very
few other promotional efforts can claim this degree of customer buy-in.
USER RESEARCH
To assess how people use email newsletters, we conducted three rounds of user
studies, as well as pilot studies to refine the test methodology. In total, ninety-three
users participated in our testing. Most participants were in the United States (in
twelve states across the country), but we also studied users in Australia, Hong Kong,
Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
The first study focused on testing newsletter usability in terms of subscribing,
unsubscribing, and maintaining the user’s account. For this study, we systematically
tested ten different newsletters, which we assigned to users to ensure that they
hadn’t previously used a newsletter’s subscription interface. Most of the study was
conducted as a traditional laboratory test: we observed users individually as they
read newsletters and attempted to subscribe and unsubscribe. We conducted
additional parts of the study remotely, through telephone calls.
We conducted our second study remotely, using a diary methodology that allowed us
a much wider geographical distribution of participants. The second study included all
of our international participants and all of our U.S. users who were not on the East
Coast. The first study had the benefit of systematically testing a set of design
variations, with multiple users for each design. However, it also had the distinct
disadvantage of people getting newsletters that they had not selected themselves.
For the second study, we looked in detail at users’ experience receiving and reading
newsletters that they’d already subscribed to on their own initiative. In total, the
participants subscribed to 345 different newsletters, and we studied 101 of those.
We studied users’ newsletter experience over a four-week period for most
participants, and over two weeks in a few cases.
This longitudinal approach allowed more emphasis on how people deal with incoming
newsletters during their workday. We were also able to test many more B2B and
intranet newsletters than we could cover in the first study, which mainly tested B2C
newsletters. Of the newsletters received by the users in our second study, 65% were
for personal purposes and 40% were for business purposes (users viewed 5% of
newsletters as both personal and business, so we counted those twice).
We conducted the third study using an eyetracker. Eyetracking let us record where
users were looking on websites as they subscribed or unsubscribed. We also
recorded how users looked at their inboxes and how they read individual newsletters.
During the third study, we systematically tested twelve newsletters (using a
controlled methodology to ensure that all newsletters were used evenly) and tested
forty newsletters in a less controlled manner (users were free to pick newsletters of
interest from an inbox, so some newsletters were read much more than others).
Finally, we tracked users’ eye movements as they read a total of sixty-five
newsletters from their personal inboxes. By definition, each of those newsletters was
read by only a single user.
In addition to studying newsletters, the third study included a component in which
people used a variety of RSS (Real Simple Syndication) readers to read news feeds.
This let us compare the newer medium of feeds with newsletters, which are now an
established media form.
Finally, our third round of research included a field-study component in which we
observed users in their offices during a normal workday. This ethnographic approach
let us learn about the use of newsletters and news feeds in an environment with
many competing information sources and demands on users’ time.
HIGH NOMINAL USABILITY
Our test users experienced unprecedentedly high levels of task completion in their
attempts to subscribe and unsubscribe to the newsletters in the study: 81% for
subscribing and 91% for unsubscribing in our most recent study.
Although high, these rates could still be improved. If, for example, a newsletter with
50,000 subscribers ensured that everyone could correctly operate its subscription
interface, it could add an estimated 11,700 subscribers on average.
Still, most usability studies find success rates of around 66% for other Web design
areas.1 Clearly, relative to this, the newsletter usability success rates are incredibly
high—even though they’re still lower than anything we would deem a truly great user
experience.
There are probably two reasons for the high success rates here. First, the tested
functionality is very simple: Get on or off a mailing list. In fact, the main failures
came on websites that complicated this functionality, such as by combining
newsletter subscriptions with site registration. In general, it’s easier to design a
simple user interface when the underlying functionality is simple.
The second reason that the subscription process had much better usability than
other Web designs is that newsletter designs are highly accountable. In many other
Web design areas, project managers can delude themselves and their bosses that
user-hostile designs, such as splash pages, offer some benefits. Create a design
where people can’t find what they want and page views might even go up as users
wander aimlessly before they leave (and give up doing business with the company).
With a newsletter subscription design, users either subscribe or they don’t. In the
latter case, websites will eventually tone down their design excesses and focus on
simplicity, and subscriptions will increase accordingly. If a site were to replace a
simple design with a complex one, it would soon notice a decline in new
subscriptions and revert to the previous design, writing off the bad design as an
expensive usability lesson.
LOW PERCEIVED USABILITY
Even though users successfully unsubscribed 91% of the time during the test
sessions, they often refrained from even trying to get off mailing lists that they no
longer wanted to receive.
The four main reasons people didn’t attempt to unsubscribe were:
Emotional attachment to the newsletter: Users said that it didn’t feel good to
sever the relationship, even when they no longer read the mailings.
Low expectations for the website’s usability: People assumed that it would be
difficult and time-consuming to unsubscribe, so they postponed the job for
another day and simply deleted the newsletter’s current issue.
Fear that unsubscribing would fail and would subject the user to even more
mail: Many people have heard that asking to get off spam lists only confirms
the validity of their email address to the spammers; this notion has become
an urban legend that contaminates users’ mental model of legitimate
newsletter publishers as well.
Easier options: It’s often easier to simply use a spam-blocking feature to stop
future issues than it is to unsubscribe.
Whatever the reason, it’s clear that mailing list owners shouldn’t assume that all
subscribers actually want to receive their newsletters. Many users might have simply
neglected to unsubscribe.
Some newsletters deliberately make it difficult to unsubscribe by hiding the
instructions or making them overly complex. The motive is probably to retain as
many subscribers as possible to maximize the reach of permission marketing
programs. In reality, however, you don’t have users’ “permission” once they stop
wanting the newsletter, regardless of whether they jump through the hoops required
to get off the list. If users keep getting unwanted newsletters, the messages will
start to backfire and become regular reminders that they’re annoyed with your
company. Better to let them go.
SPEED MATTERS
In our latest study, the subscribe process took 4 minutes, and the unsubscribe
process took 1.5 minutes. Even though these task times are not prohibitive, they’re
much too long for the simple functionality involved.
We recommend setting a usability goal of allowing an existing user to unsubscribe in
less than a minute, assuming that the user has a recent copy of the newsletter at
hand. New subscriptions should also take less than a minute when subscription
requires only the user's email address. Even if additional information is required,
users should be able to subscribe to free newsletters in less than 2 minutes. Only
newsletters that involve a subscription fee should be allowed so many steps that the
average user can’t subscribe in 2 minutes.
Users are very demanding with respect to the efficiency of operations like
subscribing or unsubscribing. For both tasks, we found extremely strong correlations
between the task time and the users’ subjective satisfaction: r = -.63 and -.95,
respectively.
These correlations basically say that the slower the subscribe or unsubscribe process,
the less people will like the site. For each additional minute it takes to subscribe, you
will lose 0.3 satisfaction points on a 1 to 7 scale, and for each additional minute it
takes to unsubscribe, you will lose 0.6 satisfaction points. As indicated by the
numbers, users are substantially more critical of a slow unsubscribe process. Once
they want out, they want out quickly.
A perfect satisfaction rating of 7 would require instantaneous task performance
according to the regression estimates. It seems impossible to create a design that
allows users to subscribe and unsubscribe in 0 seconds, but that’s ultimately what
users want. It's nobody’s goal in life to “manage subscriptions,” so any overhead
becomes an annoyance. Extreme simplicity and ease of use are necessary to make a
positive impact on customers.
IMPROVING USABILITY
In our first study, the average time to subscribe was 5 minutes. Only four years
later, the average time for this task had dropped to 4 minutes. It’s also faster to
unsubscribe: this task time dropped from 3 minutes in the first study to 1.5 minutes
four years later.
These are substantial improvements in usability over a fairly short time, showing
that companies are investing resources in advancing the newsletter user experience.
The improvements in getting off mailing lists are particularly impressive. In part, this
might be because companies have recognized that there are no benefits in
continuing to annoy customers who don’t want their newsletters. But the emphasis
on easier unsubscribe features is more likely due to legislation that requires
companies to provide users with more information about how to stop receiving email.
SIGNIFICANT PLATFORM DIVERSITY
The Web is a fairly uniform environment. Almost all users have either Internet
Explorer or Firefox, and almost all run these browsers on Windows. Yes, a few people
use Macs and browsers like Safari or Opera, but each browsing environment offers
pretty much the same features. The differences between Web browsing platforms are
like the differences between Indian and African elephants, not like those between
crabs and eagles.
In contrast, email newsletters must contend with platform diversity that is much
more like the biodiversity of the Cretaceous Period (before the comet hit). Although
Yahoo! was the most commonly used email reader in our recent study, it accounted
for only 31% of users. Eight additional platforms were represented, but people also
commonly use others, including Eudora, Lotus Notes, and a variety of mainframe
systems and Unix mail variants.
Each email platform has a different way of displaying the From line, the Subject line,
and the newsletter content. They also have different approaches to spam filtering
and other things that influence the subscriber’s user experience. This diversity makes
it crucial that newsletter designers test their subscribe and unsubscribe processes—
as well as the actual newsletter delivery and display—on all major email platforms.
SPAM IS A FACT OF LIFE
There’s a little good news (but mostly bad news) about the impact of spam on email
newsletters. The good news is that users in our recent studies were better able to
differentiate legitimate opt-in newsletters from unsolicited messages than they could
in the past. In our earlier newsletter usability studies, users sometimes confused the
two. Now, spam has a very prominent profile in terms of popular awareness, press
coverage, and the sheer amount of it hitting inboxes. Users have thus developed a
reasonable understanding of the spam phenomenon as opposed to simply being
baffled about unexpected messages.
The bad news is that the increased burden on email users has caused people to
become even more stressed and impatient when processing their inbox. Users have
less tolerance for newsletters that waste their time.
We have also found that people often use their spam filters as a shortcut to
eliminating newsletters they no longer want. Instead of unsubscribing, which users
often view as too cumbersome, they simply tell their spam-blocker that the
newsletter is spam. Voila, that newsletter no longer shows up in the inbox.
The fact that many users will declare a newsletter to be spam when they tire of it
has terrifying implications: legitimate newsletters might get blacklisted and thus be
undeliverable to other subscribers who still welcome new issues. This is a compelling
reason to increase the usability of the unsubscribe process: better to lose a
subscriber than to be listed as spam.
THE BATTLE FOR THE INBOX
Users are getting pickier and pickier about which newsletters they’ll read. Some are
purposefully cutting back on the number of newsletters they receive. These users
view newsletters as being in direct competition with each other for a limited number
of slots in the inbox. Users will unsubscribe from a newsletter or stop reading it—
even if it’s good—if they come across a different one on the same topic that better
serves their needs.
People get a lot of email. They don't have time to read a lot of text. In our most
recent study, users spent an average of 51 seconds on each of the newsletters they
read from their own inbox. Users spent an additional 33 seconds on information
found by pursuing newsletter links to websites.
Not only do you have to compete with other newsletters to get people to subscribe,
you must compete with all other email and get users to open your messages, pay
attention to your content, and click through to your site. This has always been true,
but the competition is becoming more intense as users are getting more swamped by
online information sources than they were in the past.
Email services are offering increasing amounts of storage space, often in the
gigabyte range. This allows users to save more old newsletters than was possible in
the past. On the one hand, having users archive your newsletter means that it
becomes a form of permanent outreach and will show up when they search their
personal information space. On the other hand, many newsletters might be saved
and never read. It’s worth it to use informative and enticing subject lines that
encourage users to read a newsletter while it’s fresh.
SCANNABILITY AND IMMEDIATE UTILITY
The most frequent complaint in our study was about newsletters that arrived too
often. And, when we let them vent, the most frequent advice our study participants
had for newsletter creators was to “keep it brief.”
Newsletters must be designed to facilitate scanning. In our first study, 23% of the
newsletters were read thoroughly. In our third study, four years later, only 19% of
the newsletters were read thoroughly. The drop in percentage of thoroughly read
newsletters is a good indication of the increased volume of email that users have to
process.
The dominant mode of dealing with email newsletters is to skim them: that’s what
happened to 69% of the newsletters in our most recent study. Of the remaining
newsletters, users only glanced at them or at most read a few items.
Sometimes users will simply skim the headlines to get an update or overview of
what’s going on in the field covered by the newsletter. As one user said, “I like to
keep up-to-date in the industry, but rarely delve deeper than the cover page.” Other
times, users deliberately pick out those few elements that are most important to
them and ignore the rest. As another user said, “I review the contents by company
and only read the companies of interest to me.”
Designing for users who scan rather than read is essential for a newsletter’s survival.
Scannability is important for websites as well, but it’s about 50% more important for
newsletters. This implies the need for layouts that let users quickly grasp each
issue’s content and zero in on specifics. Content and writing styles must support
users who read only part of the material.
Newsletters must be current and timely, as indicated by three of the four main
reasons that users listed for why a certain newsletter was the most valuable they
received. All of the following four reasons were given by more than 40% of users:
Informs of work-related news or company actions (mentioned by two-thirds
of users)
Reports prices/sales
Informs about personal interests/hobbies
Informs about events/deadlines/important dates
There is pretty much a “what have you done for me lately” phenomenon at play,
where newsletters have to justify their space in the inbox on a daily basis. Having
been relevant in the past is not enough. Because of the immediacy of the medium,
newsletters must be relevant today and address users’ specific needs in the moment.
Because newsletters build relationships with readers and because it’s so easy to
ignore individual issues, newsletters do get some leeway if they are predictably
relevant at certain times. During those periods when a newsletter isn’t relevant to
the user’s immediate needs, the user might simply ignore it rather than unsubscribe.
For example, a speech pathologist at an elementary school said that she could only
purchase new products at the end of the school year, and so ignored product-related
newsletters most of the year. Still, she didn’t unsubscribe, and simply receiving the
sales newsletters reminded her of the brand when she received her budget.
Users will often avoid signing up for newsletters because they feel crushed by
information overload. It is the job of the newsletter publisher to convince users that
the newsletter will be simple, useful, and easy to deal with.
A predictable publication frequency that is not too aggressive is usually best, except
for newsletters that report breaking news. A regular publication schedule lets users
know when to look for the newsletter and reduces the probability that they’ll confuse
it with spam and delete it.
Also, writing good subject lines is crucial, both in encouraging users to open the
newsletter and helping them distinguish the newsletter from spam. We recommend
including content from the issue in each subject line, even though it's a difficult job
to write good microcontent within the fifty- to sixty-character limit that many email
services impose.
RSS/NEWS FEEDS
The first, and strongest, guideline about news feeds is to stop calling them RSS. In
our most recent study, 82% of users had no idea what this term referred to. In
general, it’s typically wrong to use implementation-oriented terminology, because
most users don’t understand the underlying technology and don’t care about it. It’s
better to use terms that indicate what the concept does for users, and “news feeds”
does this far better than “RSS.”
Some users were familiar with the general idea of feeds, even if they didn’t know the
term “RSS.” This was typically because they were receiving feeds on their My Yahoo!
page or a similar personalized portal.
Users had very mixed feelings about feeds. Some people liked viewing information
from multiple sites in a single centralized location instead of having to go to each
site. Some users also liked scanning a list of headlines without seeing any content
that they didn’t ask for. A final benefit some users appreciated was the ability to
determine when they would go and view their news items. This is in contrast with
newsletter arrival times, which users can’t control.
On the other hand, many users had negative feelings about feeds. People who are
already suffering from information overload resent having to go to yet another
source of information. In contrast, email newsletters arrive in a tool that people
already use, so they don’t add yet another thing for over-burdened users to do.
Email is also easier to archive for later use, whereas feeds have an ephemeral
nature.
Several participants in our study had stopped using the feeds on their My Yahoo!
page. Many previous studies have found that users are reluctant to spend time
customizing portals, so it’s not surprising that some users simply decided to stop
looking at that part of the page rather than edit their preference settings.
Finally, some users resented the fact that news feeds are divorced from the context
of the publisher’s website. These users preferred the serendipity that came from
visiting a full-fledged website that offered options beyond the current headlines.
News feeds are definitely not for everybody, and they’re not a replacement for email
newsletters. Feeds can supplement newsletters for sites that cater to users who
prefer a centralized view of headlines. These are primarily newspaper sites and other
sites with a heavy focus on news and breaking stories, as well as sites that target
Internet enthusiasts. For sites that target mainstream business users or a broad
consumer audience, news feeds may be less important. Such sites might be better
off emphasizing higher-quality newsletters and a choice of publication frequency.
Also, our eyetracking of users reading news feeds showed that people scan headlines
and blurbs in feeds even more ruthlessly than they scan newsletters. When you
appear in somebody’s news reader, your site has a diminutive footprint that’s
rubbing shoulders with a flood of headlines from many other sites. Under these
conditions, users often read only the first two words of a headline, so it’s crucial to
have brief headlines and to start them with the most information-carrying words.
Feeds are a cold medium in comparison with email newsletters. Feeds don’t form the
same relationship between company and customers that a good newsletter can build.
We don’t have data to calculate the relative business value of a newsletter subscriber
compared to a feeds subscriber, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that
companies make ten times as much money from each newsletter subscriber. Given
that newsletters are a warmer and much more powerful medium, it is probably best
for most companies to encourage newsletter subscriptions and promote them over
feeds on their website.
FUTURE OF EMAIL NEWSLETTERS
Four years ago, in our first report about newsletter usability, we said about the
future of email newsletters: “There may be none. Legitimate use of email is at war
with spam, and spam may be winning.”
Although four years is a very short period in which to assess big trends, we now
believe that this assessment was too negative. Email newsletters are so powerful
that the best of them do have a future, despite ever-more adverse conditions.
Ever-increasing information overload is definitely making users reluctant to sign up
for more email. And once newsletters arrive in the user’s inbox, they might simply be
deleted as part of the ruthless mass deletion procedure aimed at the morning’s
spam. Finally, as discussed above, fear of spam and other email abuse is keeping
users from dealing rationally with newsletter subscriptions.
When we asked users why they liked email newsletters, more than one-third
highlighted the following three benefits:
Email newsletters are informative and keep users up-to-date (mentioned by
two-thirds of the users).
Email newsletters are convenient and are delivered straight to the user’s
information central; they then require no further action beyond a simple click.
Email newsletters have timely information and real-time delivery.
Newsletters that leverage these advantages (along with other points that users
mentioned) have a stable future. But they must continually deliver specific benefits
that help users with life or work issues in the here and now.
Comparing email newsletters with other media, one user said:
“Bottom line, I’d
rather have it in an email newsletter than in the regular mail. I can click Delete if I
don’t want it; I don’t have to throw anything away; and it is usually easier to
unsubscribe if you don’t want to get anymore.”
Convenience rules.
This is one of the few times we have found that the virtual world was better and
more convenient than the physical world. Usually, websites have such poor usability
that they compare very unfavorably with real-world stores or in-person services and
communities. In contrast, email newsletters have a very strong position.
Return to main page of:
Email Newsletter Usability:165 design guidelines for subscription interfaces & newsletter content based on user research
|
