In "Email Newsletters Pick Up Where Websites Leave Off," Jakob Nielsen discusses how to correctly use newsletters. This is important for me because I just started my own website, jethrojones.com, and I have thought about the idea of doing newsletters to keep my family and friends informed via newsletters. Also, I subscribe to a newsletter from Jeffrey Gitomer's website about selling. He does an excellent job of drawing you back to his website where he wants you to buy stuff.
Jakob Nielsen says that one thing that surprised him was the "high emotional reaction." Websites are usually able to deal with functionality; people see websites as a tool, but newsletters are more personal because they arrive in the inbox, and come regularly, and so you have a relationship with them. This can be both positive and negative. Positive because it can build a good relationship. Negative because it can destroy that relationship if the user gets annoyed and frustrated by the usability, design, or difficulty in functionality.
The newsletters tested were surprisingly easy to use. They had high usability rates for performing two very important tasks: 78% for subscribing and 92% for unsubscribing; compared to the usual 50-60% rating for websites.
The high success rates are probably due to two reasons:
People that did not like the newsletters did not even try to unsubscribe from the newsletter. Some reasons why:
Makers of newsletters should realize that not all their subscribers actually want to receive the newsletter. Some makers of newsletters make it difficult to cancel on purpose. Not wise, the continuing newsletter emails does nothing but annoy the consumer and remind them that you are like frames: you suck.
The average time to subscribe was five minutes, unsubscribe was three minutes. That is much to long for the simplicity of the task. Designers should make it a goal to get both processes to under one minute (assuming that the user has a copy of a newsletter close by.
The goal is to be able to provide the easiest and quickest task completion.
"Ultimate simplicity and ease of use" means people want something that is simple and will not take a lot of time. Make it that way.
A lot of users use different platforms for checking their email and if they are not noticed with their platform, they will lose respect and interest.