My role in the project:
Research, Design & Development
Background
Every month iiNet sends out a newsletter to all the subscribed customers which covers some of the latest iiNet news, and also the latest in tech, gaming, social & media worlds. The purpose of the newsletters are to keep the customers connected to the brand.
The Project
When I first started out at iiNet, designing and developing the iiNews email was one of my frequent tasks. This was the previous design.
One morning I opened my inbox to find an EDM from inVision. Looking at their design I wondered why they took this approach with their designs. Was there some reasoning behind it? So I did some research.
From there to now
After reviewing a few industry reports covering eDM/newsletter best practices and developing some wireframes I decided to propose some improvements to our template.
One of the critical parts of our EDM process that was failing (according to industry reports) was we had too many words. Users don't like to read. This was something that was continually enforced in the reports. The data below is from a Nielsen Norman Group study showing just how little Newsletters are read:
“the average time allocated to a newsletter after opening it was only 51 seconds. “Reading” is not even the right word, since participants fully read only 19% of newsletters. The predominant user behaviour was scanning. Often, users didn’t even scan the entire newsletter: 35% of the time, participants only skimmed a small part of the newsletter or glanced at the content.”
“People were highly inclined to skip the introductory blah-blah text in newsletters. Although this text was only three lines long on average, our eyetracking recordings revealed that 67% of users had zero fixations within newsletter introductions.”
These were our recommendations:
1. A more ‘scan-friendly’ layout. With less copy and bigger headlines we expect more users to locate information of interest resulting in higher click-through
2. Content is king. We’ve dropped the intro blurb focusing completely on articles
3. A new CTA at the base leading users directly to the blog
4. Personalisation now occurs in the pre-header and will display alongside the subject line in your mail client:
The New layout
After our first newsletter we saw a huge increase in both clickthroughs from newsletter to blog article, and also people opening the newsletter in their email client instead of just deleting it straight away. The project was a success.
