Stay in Contact

Artfully designed and managed opt-in e-mailed newsletters offered by catalogers can create a strong emotional bond with customers.

E-newsletters can be broadly defined and may include original, product-independent content (e.g., recipes, feature articles, letters to the editor) as well as news about a sender’s products (e.g., special promotions, new-merchandise previews). Numerous catalogers already offer e-newsletters, including Musician’s Friend, Healthy Roads, Femail Creations and Time Motion Tools.

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., a principal with the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG), which published a study on recipients’ attitudes toward e-mailed newsletters from businesses, says, “The positive emotional aspect of e-newsletters is that they can create more of a bond between user and company than a mere Web site can.”

The NNG study, entitled “Email Newsletter Usability,” appeared on the heels of a similar report released by DoubleClick, an Internet marketing firm. The DoubleClick survey found that 37 percent of all promotional e-mail in the third quarter of 2002 was opened by recipients. Business products and services e-mails had the highest open rates at 47 percent, followed by travel and consumer products and services at 42 percent.

A Checklist

Following are some design guidelines and strategies that can help you better plan and manage an e-newsletter program.

• Don’t waste potential subscribers’ time. Too often, subscribing to an e-mail newsletter becomes a convoluted process demanding the completion of a long, drawn-out form. NNG recommends an online subscribing process that takes no more than 60 seconds.

“On average, among the newsletters we studied, the subscribe process took five minutes — much too long for this simple functionality,” Nielsen says. “Only newsletters that involve a subscription fee should be allowed so many steps to their subscription process that the average user can’t subscribe in two minutes.”

Catalogers such as Musician’s Friend and Healthy Roads both endorse Nielsen’s minimalistic approach. For those subscribing to their e-newsletters, the catalogers require nothing more than an e-mail address.

If you’d like to get a bit more data out of your customers, ask for no more than five to seven subscriber-information items on a subscription page, recommends Jeanne Jennings, an e-mail newsletter design consultant and a columnist for numerous publications. Online cataloger Time Motion Tools (www.timemotion.com) takes this approach, asking potential subscribers to part only with their first and last names and their e-mail addresses. And A.G. Ferrari Foods (www.agferrari.com) requires only a first name, e-mail address and the e-newsletter format the subscriber prefers.

• Don’t make a subscriber feel like a target. Be cautious of the data you request. “Asking a new subscriber for a street address, phone number or information on purchase authorization signals that you want to fill his or her electronic, snail and voice mailboxes with solicitations,” Jennings says. “People either will abandon the page without subscribing or they’ll lie. Neither of these furthers your cause.”

• Be honest about how you’ll deal with a subscriber. Include elements that increase registration rates, such as links to a sample issue and your privacy policy, Jennings continues. Include a one- or two-

sentence summary of your privacy policy on the subscription page.

Take a tip from Jonathan Penney, a master printmaker who offers an online catalog of his work.

At his site, www.bwdarkroom.com, Penney clearly states he won’t share subscriber data with third parties.

• Deliver on your e-newsletter’s mission promise. Even though most company e-mail newsletters are free, all must deliver on the content promises made to the subscriber, according to Nielsen. Essentially, the right to space in a subscriber’s e-mail inbox has to be earned with each issue. “The cost in clutter must be paid for by being helpful and relevant to users and by communicating these benefits in a few characters in the subject line,” Nielsen says.

• Keep it simple. While you’d think the simplicity maxim would be obvious, NNG researchers found that only 23 percent of e-newsletters studied were read thoroughly. Most of the remaining e-publications in the study group were only skimmed or read partly. And 27 percent of all e-newsletters were not even opened.

How can you avoid this fate for your own e-newsletters? Nielsen says these figures indicate that too many e-newsletters wasted readers’ time or were too much work to read. “In subjective comments, users basically said e-newsletters are good if they cut down the time it takes users to accomplish something, or if they are quick reads that don’t feel frivolous,” he notes.

Include content that is relevant to your catalog’s mission. For example, Healthy Roads, a cataloger of vitamins and nutritional products, offers in its e-newsletter healthy recipes and fitness-related articles, in addition to product promotions. A.G. Ferrari Foods, a merchant of Italian foods, features articles on new products and upcoming events, in addition to Web-only deals on select merchandise.

• If you’re including original content in your e-newsletter, hire a professional writer, either in-house or freelance. Nothing inspires a recipient to reach for the delete button more quickly than poorly written, irrelevant content. Put another way, skimping on costs here actually could do more damage than not having an e-newsletter at all.

• Publish regularly. “A predictable publication frequency that’s not too aggressive usually is best,” Nielsen advises. “A regular publication schedule lets users know when to look for the e-newsletter and reduces the probability it will be deleted.”

A good frequency plan for a cataloger might be once per month on average. One idea successfully employed at various catalog companies is to send an e-mailed newsletter just prior to a catalog drop. In your e-mail, include descriptions and commentary about your new merchandise and links to those product pages on your Web site.

• Design for all major e-mail readers. “Our test users were almost evenly distributed between AOL, Hotmail, Netscape Mail, Outlook and Yahoo! Mail,” Nielsen says. “It’s also common to find people using Eudora, Lotus Notes and mainframe systems.” Given that each of these e-mail readers has a different way of displaying e-newsletter content, filtering spam and other idiosyncrasies, the safest bet is to preview your e-newsletter design on each type of system, Nielsen recommends.

• Make it easy to unsubscribe. Companies that amass legions of e-newsletter subscribers understandably are reluctant to say good-bye to them. Consequently, many e-newsletter publishers are tempted to make unsubscribing an arduous process. That’s a bad move, Nielsen says. Not only will you annoy prospects and customers, you’ll continue to irritate them each time your unwanted e-newsletter shows up in their e-mail boxes. “Users are substantially more critical of a slow unsubscribe process,” he says. “Once they want out, they want out quickly.”

Body System Technology (www.bodysystemtechnology.com) posts an unsubscribe tool right next to the e-newsletter subscription box at its site.

Use these steps to help guide you in setting up a terrific e-newsletter program.

Joe Dysart of Thousand Oaks, CA, is a business consultant and a speaker on Internet initiatives. Contact him at (805) 379-3841 or joedysart@aol.com.