E-mail Newsletter Readers Adapt Behavior to Read Them Through The Flood of Spam

Nielsen Norman Group, the company of which usability expert Jakob Nielsen is a part of, has released a very interesting study on spam and how e-mail readers have adapted their behavior to get to these newsletters they have subscribed to, despite the flood of e-mails they get. “E-mail newsletters are no longer at war with spam, as we observed two years ago. Today, users know spam, and can identify the qualities of well-designed email newsletters. The bad news, however, is that poorly designed or ineffective newsletters that fail to keep the interest of users risk getting blacklisted and possibility prevented from being delivered to other subscribers,” said Nielsen, in a statement.

Some topline findings:

– While users show a better ability then they did in the past to
differentiate legitimate opt-in newsletters from unsolicited messages,
they’re feeling increasingly stressed dealing with their inboxes, and now
have even less tolerance for newsletters they feel waste their time;

– Rather than un-subscribing to newsletters they no longer want, users
will use their spam filters as a shortcut to avoid the newsletters;

– Users have a “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately” attitude about email
newsletters, which means that newsletters constantly have to justify their
space in the inboxes;

– The three most frequently mentioned reasons that users subscribe to
e-mail newsletters are that they are 1) informative; 2) convenient; and 3)
timely, qualities that are often lacking in newsletters put out by big
companies.

I am going through the full report right now, and will post some additional details of the research later on…

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