Don't E-Newsletters just add to
information overload?
Not if targeted, consistent, scannable and brief, professional and genuinely informative. The best newsletters build customer relationships.
Your web site, though a critical communication tool, is fighting for visibility with many other sites and feeds don't form the same relationship that a good newsletter can build.
Scannable - according to studies by usability guru Jakob Nielsen, the average time allocated to a newsletter after opening was only 51 seconds. Users only read 19% of newsletters fully, the rest are scanned, 35% of participants only skimmed small parts of the newsletter and 67% skipped the introduction.
Once Subscribed, users rarely unsubscribe and with ever increasing bandwidth and storage space, email newsletters are often stored. So, the long-term value of newsletters compared to other Internet media forms is superior. They become part of users' personal information space, found when they search their own environments so you may see a "slow tail" of clicks and orders. This makes it valuable to implement at least basic SEO (search engine optimization), when writing content. There is a triple benefit to this effort; keep it brief to help users skim for benefit, optimized to consider how they may want to retrieve old issues stored locally in the months or years to come and link this brief content in your newsletter to more detailed, related information added to your site for those 19% who do want more and for others looking for that information, increasing value to the user and expanding your site's activity and searchability.
In brief, newsletters build relationships and add long term value. The best are specialized to user's needs, timely, brief, arrive on a predictable schedule and scannable - the ability to pick out what you want is critical.
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