All About Email Marketing

My Top Five Pet Peeves About Email Newsletters

May 2003 | by Jeannie (Schuett) Ruesch

How many email newsletters do you subscribe to? A few? A lot? I love email newsletters. I think they are terrific (for reasons beside the obvious one). From books to home decorating tips to marketing news, if a topic strikes my interest and there's an email newsletter about it, I'll sign up for it. Last count, I am a current subscriber to about 30 newsletters, both professional and personal interest oriented.

However, I've easily signed up for more than a hundred newsletters in the last few years, leaving about 70 newsletters that have not kept my interest. Why? What causes me to unsubscribe from your newsletter? Simple. Pet peeves. The more of them I find in a newsletter, the more likely I am to unsubscribe. My pet peeves are not huge problems, but they easily add up to make me an unsatisfied subscriber. So let's take a look at the top five pet peeves that will cause me, and perhaps other readers, to unsubscribe from your email newsletter:

Pet Peeve #1: Meaningless Subject lines

My first pet peeve is a pretty big one - Subject lines that are meaningless to me either by not offering enough information or offering way too much. The subject line helps me decide whether or not to open the email; therefore, this pet peeve richly deserves the number one spot. When it comes to filtering through my email inbox, my attention span is no different from any other email user. I’ll devote about one second to the headers, including both “From” and Subject lines. So, if the “From” line isn’t recognizable, or the Subject line doesn’t pop out at me, chances are neither will the email.

So, what are some of the subject lines that don’t make the grade? First, subject lines that don’t provide enough information, such as “News Daily for Thursday, May 21, 2003” There is simply nothing important or special enough about that subject to inspire any action on my part. On the opposite end of the spectrum are subject lines that provide too much information, such as: “SONAR news, in-depth look at Project’s PSYN, artist news, tech tips, special offers, and more.” There is so much information crammed into the subject line, nothing jumps out and nothing catches my interest enough to open it.

It’s easy to forget that the purpose of a subject line is simply to get your subscribers to open the email. I respond best to topics that catch my interest, ask me a question or tease me with what’s inside. Here are a few ways to simplify (or beef up) your subject line:

- A date is mostly wasted space that could be used for better phrasing. Most Email programs tell you the date it was delivered, so you don’t need to be redundant.

- Don’t try to overload the subject line with everything in your newsletter. Keep it short and simple.

- Be specific. Try picking one article or feature and highlight that in the subject line.

Pet Peeve #2: Bad uses of personalization

Personalization is a tricky topic, but it’s also a draw for many readers. However, it comes in at number two on my pet peeve list when it’s done incorrectly. When I see bad examples of personalization, I feel like I have a mailing list number stamped on my forehead, and it becomes a glaring reminder that there is not a personalized relationship here. There are a couple of examples of personalization gone wrong that do nothing to inspire my confidence or loyalty towards a company. For example, a subject line that says:

jeannie@emaillabs.com, a special DVD offer from Columbia House just for you.

They are telling me that they have a special offer JUST for me. How special…and yet, they don’t know my first name? They address me as if my email address is my name, which is the biggest mistake in personalization that I often see. Another example of misused personalization:

Jeannie, issue #325, marketing efforts, quick hints and top news

This subject line is exactly the opposite from the first. By using my first name, they imply a more personal tone and yet the remainder of their subject line is completely impersonal.

Personalization can also be used in mixed ways through the newsletter, as well. For instance, I receive two separate newsletters that personalize the beginning of the actual newsletter with my name. One of the newsletters offers a quick note from the editor – from her to me. This is a very nice use of personalization. The other newsletter has no personal notes inside; it’s strictly a listing of articles. And yet, they address me personally at the top of the newsletter content. There is nothing personal about the content; therefore it does not need to be addressed directly to me.

Here are a couple of hints on the correct usage of personalization:

- Personalization should not be random. Be sure you know the reasons for adding a name or email address; do not just throw random personalized items into your email.

- If you are personalizing by using first name, be sure your content (whether subject line or newsletter based) is written in a more personal voice, as well.

- Email addresses should never replace formal addressing of first names. If you do not have first names, do not replace the “Dear Jane” with “Dear jane@abccompany.com.”

Pet Peeve #3: Little (or no) organization to the newsletter

For me, one of the greatest things about email newsletters is the convenience of having information delivered right to my inbox. It takes little effort on my part to get it, but I do have a certain expectation when I receive it. Part of my love affair with email newsletters is that I get information without having to extend much effort to search for it. This leads directly into my third pet peeve, a lack of organization in an email. There are a number of ways an email newsletter can be disorganized – poor layout, too much information, too many ads or self-promotions or not having a table of contents to glance at first.

For example, I’ve gotten the eMarketer Daily newsletter for over a year now. The first few times I received it, I had to scroll through the entire email to see what the articles covered and if they were remotely relevant to my work. It took more time than I wanted to devote to an email. However, somewhere during the last year they changed their newsletter format to include a table of contents. Yippee!

Now, I can glance at the eMarketer Daily in a few seconds and know instantly if it contains anything of interest to me. With that small change, they turned me from a once-in-a-while reader to an everyday reader.

Email marketing is about information, but it’s also about convenience and ease-of-use. If your content is too long (for instance including a full two-page article in the newsletter), or there are too many ads or self-promotions in between articles, it makes the content hard to find and requires more time and effort.

Whether HTML or text based, your newsletter should be simply organized, with the articles easy to find. Here are a few easy ways to better organize your newsletters:

- A table of contents is the easiest. It allows quick access to the information they want.

- Make sure your information is in digestible chunks. Rather than including a full two page article, include the first few paragraphs as a lead in and link to the rest.

- Clearly separate ads from the articles. You don’t want to make it difficult to find the articles included in your newsletter.

Pet Peeve #4: Not enough content to be worth my while

Pet Peeve #4 is well demonstrated by a weekly newsletter that I receive from my favorite hockey team. Their website is colorful, exciting and informative. However, their newsletter is dismally bare. There is no presence to the newsletter - no title, banner, or even an introductory paragraph. (Heck, I’d be happier with a sentence that said hello.)

Content wise, it contains nothing but links with cursory explanations about what you’ll find by clicking on the link.

When I first received it, I would look at it briefly to see if the links looked interesting. Very quickly I moved to just deleting the email whenever it came to my inbox to finally just unsubscribing altogether. I’m a big fan of the team, but their newsletter leaves me cold. There’s no spice to it, nothing that teases my mind and makes me want for more. It’s probably the worst case of email marketing that I have seen. In this particular instance, they had a captive audience – me. I had signed up for the newsletter, expecting to receive an email that matched the spirit of the team the way that the website did and offered me information at my fingertips. They failed.

These are just a few things you should consider when building the newsletter:

- Create an identity for your newsletter – by using a header, a title, you build an identify that your readers will recognize.

- If your content is mostly linked to your website, be sure to offer teaser paragraphs in the email newsletter. Take the first paragraph of your article and include it, to tease them enough to want more.

- Be sure some of your content is original, not just links to other articles from other sites. You want your newsletter to offer something that your readers cannot get anywhere else.

Pet Peeve #5: The design is entirely too distracting

This may seem in direct conflict with Pet Peeve #4, but I assure you it’s not. Good design is important, but there is definitely a thing called overkill. When I’m trying to read a newsletter, I don’t like to be distracted by bright colors, flashy animation or other things that will inadvertently draw my eye elsewhere. What looks good on print, or even on a website, doesn’t always translate well to email. Bright, lighter colors can glare on your monitor, and animation can just be a distraction.

The worst offender of this pet peeve arrived within the last week in my inbox. I’m in the process of moving, so I’ve subscribed to a number of home decorating newsletters. One in particular is from a company that provides household goods through their website and catalog. Their latest email newsletter to me was a listing of the items on sale. The content was interesting enough to me and I would have liked to read it further. However, the email was designed with animated flowers that completely surrounded the text and distracted my attention so much that I found it hard to read the email. So I deleted it. It was simply too hard to read. One of the easiest (though rarely considered) things to manage well is the presentation of your email and how easy it is to focus on and read through.

- Take away any factors that will distract them from the newsletter, such as blinking flowers.

- Keep the colors that you use easy to read. Black text on a white background is by far the easiest.

- Whether HTML or plain text, keep the content easy to follow and well-ordered.

Most of my pet peeves are fairly simple issues, but I’m still surprised at how many newsletters contain at least one of them. The objective of your newsletter should be to make it user-friendly, easy to digest and informative. A successful newsletter will not only depend on your content and look, but on how your subscribers react to it.