I was doing some research on email newsletters for a client recently when I came across some interesting stats published by Jakob Nielsen that appeared in this blog post. Nielsen made an eyetracking heatmap based on data he collected from people reading an email newsletter and broke down where they looked the most (red) and the least (blue).
As you can see below, people stick to the left of the newsletter, read the headline, and lose interest as they scroll down.
Here’s what else he found:
People spend an average of 51 seconds reading your newsletter, though reading is a bit of a misnomer because they actually just skim it – only 19% read an entire newsletter. It gets worse: they don’t even skimthe whole newsletter. 35% of the time, they just skim part of the newsletter. And almost no one reads the introduction (OK, 33% do), so you might as well skip it.
I think email newsletters are still valid ways to keep in touch with your customers, prospective customers, and network in general, but based on this information, you are probably making a bunch of mistakes. No biggie, they are easy to fix.
1. Keep it short. If you learn nothing else, remember this: keep your newsletter short–three articles at most, all of which are short. Otherwise, you are basically wasting your time writing stuff that no one will read. Therefore, you really need to focus on publishing information that your readers will find useful and interesting. Case in point: My favorite newsletter arrives once a week, and it contains one short article that is always worth reading.
2. Skip the intro. Intros to newsletters are basically little previews of the newsletter, right? Well, if your newsletter is short anyway, your readers don’t need you to tell them what to expect. As the above stats show, they’re going to skim the headlines anyway. It’s far better to just focus on the headlines and content.
3. Focus on headlines. If you want to grab your readers’ attention and actually tempt them to read something in the newsletter, write the most compelling headlines possible: quick tips, a numbered list of top whatever, must-haves/can’t miss lists, etc.
4. Keep best info up top. Put your most interesting or useful article at the top of the newsletter so it will be more likely to get read. If you want your readers to take action on something, like signing up for a webinar, definitely put that information at the beginning. Keep more general industry news at the bottom.
5. Include images. Readers are always drawn to images, especially of people, which you can see by looking at the heatmap. Just include high-quality images that are related to what you are writing about and not for the sake of visual interest alone.
Image Courtesy: Jakob Nielsen
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