Short, but not too short
From the Can’t-Win-For-Losing Department: Although subscribers’ No. 1 piece of advice to email newsletter creators is to keep e-zines short, those same subscribers generally get frustrated when newsletters are too brief.
This according to the Nielsen Norman Group’s 6 rounds of email newsletter usability studies conducted over 16 years.
To make sure you’re delivering the goods in email newsletters:
- Pay off the subject line. Don’t overpromise and underdeliver. (But don’t underdeliver and overpromise, either.)
- Don’t omit details. Don’t make recipients search for the price, for instance.
- Don’t make them click. Don’t use email newsletters to drive clicks. Use them to deliver value. And put that value right there, in the newsletter.
- Don’t cut off midsentence. Subscribers see that as a way to force clicks.
- Make links clear. If recipients must click to read, be very clear about what they’ll get if they do click. Deliver enough details to draw subscribers to your website.
So avoid Click here, Read more in email newsletters.
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Sources: Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen; Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty, 6th Edition; Nielsen Norman Group, 2017
How can you get the word out via email?
Email recipients spend an average of just 11 seconds on marketing emails they review. They spend just 51 seconds on email newsletters.
In this environment, how do you get the word out via email?
Find out at Get Opened, Read, Clicked — our email-writing workshop.
You’ll learn how to make your email message short — but not too short, how to write paragraphs that get read on smartphones, and how to hit the right readability level for email.
You’ll leave with tips, tricks, latest best practices — and the data to back it all up — for getting your email newsletters and marketing pieces opened and read.
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