About ezines
The following information is adapted from Email newsletter usability (Executive Summary) - a Nielsen Norman Group Report.
Ezines and the user
Email newsletters (ezines) are unique in that:
- users have highly emotional reactions to them
- they feel personal because they arrive in a user's inbox
- users have an ongoing relationship with them.
Ezines can create a bond between the user and the sender (eg institution), so are a very powerful medium. Therefore it is important to get them right. However this also means that newsletter usability problems will strongly affect customer relations.
Important features for a good customer relationship:
- subscribe and unsubscribe should be quick and easy functions (less than 1 minute)
- minimal frequency of publication unless it is report breaking news. An ezine's main purpose should be to keep users up to date.
See Style elements and guidelines for more
information.
Design for the user
Content, look and feel
Encourage your users to read the ezine while it is fresh. Design should be simple and avoid wasting the user's time. This means:
- minimal text - keep it brief
- informative and enticing Subject lines that include content from the issue that is meaningful but brief (there is a 50 to 60 character limit in many email services)
- scannable - use meaningful headings that people can skim so users can pick out elements that are important to them and ignore the rest.
Accessibility and testing
The design of your ezine should cater for platform diversity. Different email accounts have different ways of:
- displaying the From and Subject lines
- displaying newsletter content
- approaching spam filtering.
To ensure accessibility, your design product should be tested on all major email platforms for:
- subscribe and unsubscribe processes
- delivery (non receipt eg hotmail)
- display (hyperlinks, images, layout).
Please note: your ezine could look like one of these email examples if configured incorrectly.