Newsletters can help (or hurt) your e-business

E-mail newsletters, of course, are close to my heart, since I write this one. For that reason, I might be a bad person to give you advice about them.

But Jakob Nielsen, the Web usability expert from the Norman Nielsen Group, is a great person to give you advice. He and Amy Stover have studied the way recipients use and relate to newsletters from e-commerce sites, and they've put together a revealing study that can be valuable if you're thinking about publishing (or you already publish) a newsletter for your e-business.

1. ONGOING RELATIONSHIP. The biggest difference between a site and its newsletter, the authors report, is that the newsletter comes into people's personal mailboxes, so they feel a more emotional connection to it. The downside of this is that if something about the newsletter doesn't work -- its subscribe or unsubscribe procedure, for example -- "users were quick to assume bad intentions by the newsletter providers."

2. SPAM CONFUSION. Some users call spam "newsletters" and newsletters "spam," interchangeably. To avoid being mistaken for spam, the authors recommend that your newsletter be regularly sent on the same day of the week (or, if daily, the same time each day). In addition, use a meaningful subject line that avoids overused words such as "free" and "debt." Place at the top of each newsletter a reminder of its origin, such as, "Here is today's issue of Technology Bytes, a Morningstar.com e-mail newsletter you've asked to receive."

3. SUBSCRIBING AND UNSUBSCRIBING. The authors found that users succeeded in subscribing 78 percent of the time and unsubscribing 92 percent of the time. These are high numbers, considering that only 50 to 60 percent of people succeed in basic tasks at the average Web site. The numbers could still be improved, however. A newsletter with 100,000 subscribers would have more than 128,000 if everyone succeeded who tried to subscribe.

The process of unsubscribing gets special attention in the study. The time it took the average user to cancel the average newsletter was a real drag: 3 minutes and 5 seconds. (People who think spam should be permitted as long as it offers an opt-out feature should meditate on that figure. To opt out from 20 sources of spam each day would require more than an hour a day, assuming the unsubscribe process even worked.)

Partly as a result of the time factor, most users don't unsubscribe from newsletters they no longer want. Instead, the authors found people saying things like, "There's never an easy way to unsubscribe," and "If you hit 'unsubscribe' it just confirms your e-mail address is right and you get more e-mail." The latter statement is factually untrue, because spammers don't care who unsubscribes, much less keep track of it. But the widespread rumor about this means that people block or report as spam those newsletters they're tired of.

Nielsen and Stover's report, "E-Mail Newsletter Usability," is available as a full-color, 186-page PDF file. The cost is $195 for a single copy, or $418 for a copy you are licensed to reproduce within your organization. See: http://www.nngroup.com@n6.be/4e74

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