Why Your eMail Newsletter Annoys Your Readers

Email newsletters are powerful tools for marketing communications. Typically very easy for users to subscribe to, they are cheap and easy to produce, can reach a large targeted audience, and remind potential customers of your business without requiring them to visit your site. Best of all, they work on a subscription basis. In other words, people ask you to send them promotional information on a regular basis!

However, they can be a double-edged sword: get them wrong and they score a black mark against you every time they land in a user's inbox.

I get about 10-15 newsletters a day. After deciding that my mailbox was getting too clogged, I carried out a quick review, with the aim of culling them off to a more manageable quantity. The exercise yielded a bumper crop of usability issues, some of which are true crimes against the user, often perpetrated by the biggest names on the web - including a famous usability expert!

The following is a summary of the problems I encountered. If you have a newsletter, consider the following as a list of things you should never do.

Poor subscribe / unsubscribe information

This is a surprisingly common issue. Doubtless there are companies who think it's a bad idea to provide information on cancelling the subscription at the end of the newsletter so people will continue to receive it ad infinitum. This doesn't work. It's easy to send unopened mail from a specified sender into a junk folder, where it will never be read. In one case, I tried to unsubscribe and had to resort to visiting the company's website and mailing my request. I was assured that I would be removed from the mailing list and then, two days later received the offending newsletter again. This tells me that the organisation in question is happy to ignore my requests. Not a good marketing message.

Too many ads and not enough content

There's nothing wrong with putting advertisements in a newsletter, but if the number of ads becomes too large, this can become annoying as the user has to sift through them to get to the content. Remember - it's the content they took the trouble to subscribe for, and while they will tolerate some advertising, users will quickly tire of advertising-only newsletters. Similarly, lots of links to sites related to your organisation should be avoided. One example I received had 16 of these links presented in a list.

Similarly, overselling a special offer to newsletter subscribers is a bad idea. One renowned usability expert has sent me more hard-sell special offers than newsletters in the last 12 months. Updates on special offers are a nice enticement to subscribe to a newsletter but if there's going to be more of them than newsletters, then provide this as a separate option.

Too much content

Email is no longer a novelty and people don't like being forced to read long emails. You may think that lots of content adds value but that's not always the case. Often people are too busy to read a long newsletter, or don't bother wading through it to find the interesting information. If you must deliver a long newsletter, provide a table of contents or an overview of some sort, right at the top. That way, users can quickly decide if they want to read it and will keep it in their mailbox until time allows. Otherwise they will delete it on the spot.

Also, long articles that are not broken into easy to scan chunks are difficult to read. It's good practice to have a header, a summary and then a link to more information on your website, if need be. Lay out the newsletter so each article looks like an identifiable element on the page.

HTML newsletters with lots of images

These tend to be presented like a page from a website. The whole point of an email newsletter (from the user's point of view) is that they don't have to go to the website to read it. Why then would they want an unnecessarily large file delivered into their mail box? Often these don't fit neatly in the preview window or cause compatability problems with email applications. If you must use a HTML format, provide a text alternative which users can choose if they want to.

Long link titles

It's common practice to provide a short summary of articles and a link so the user can visit your site and read the article in question. This is a good way to encourage traffic to your site. While they are there, users may look at other sections or maybe even buy something. It also keeps the size of the newsletter down to a handy, easy to scan proportion that won't clog the mailbox. However, these links are often too long to fit inside the width of the screen. This makes it impossible to click on the link and the user can't follow it to your site.

Broken links fall into the same category. Always, always, test links before you send out your newsletter.

Uninvited delivery (spamming)

I've just received an unsolicited newsletter from Gartner while I was writing this article. This type of 'Spam' is exceptionally annoying. In this case, it caused me to stop what I was doing to check my mail. Then I had to unsubscribe. I didn't read the newsletter because I was annoyed, and in the time taken to unsubscribe, I forgot the original point I was going to make on this issue and had to substitute it with this anecdote instead. Spam is never a good idea. It makes people angry and they will say bad things about you to others. Case in point: this paragraph.

Repeatedly sending the same content

This week I received the same newsletter three times. Nothing had changed in either newsletter. Not even the ads! This is just irritating.

Likewise delivering two of the same newsletter at once is bothersome. This is probably due to a technical issue but that doesn't make it any less annoying. Doing this makes it look like you are trying to take over the user's mail box.

Using the wrong language

This is a pretty extreme example but it does happen. I don't speak Japanese, nor do I read it, and yet, someone sent me a newsletter that required me to install the Kanji character set in my email browser. I didn't waste my time.

Failing to encourage interaction

Ideally a newsletter should create sales leads by encouraging the recipients to contact the organization. Failing to include feedback links or "contact the author" type details means that you are missing an opportunity to find out more about your audience and their preferences.

Finally: have an editorial process

Newsletters, like websites will degrade in quality, if they are not maintained over time. Having an editorial process in place will ensure that none of the errors described above will creep into your newsletter. Taking a little time to keep your newsletter user friendly pays dividends by ensuring that your marketing communication creates a positive impression when it reaches your audience.