5 ways to write an e-newsletter people will read

I recently researched email newsletters for a client, and I came across some interesting statistics published by Jakob Nielsen in this blog post. Although the post is a few years old, the stats still hold true. Nielsen made an eye tracking heat map 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 stuck to the left of the online newsletter, read the headline, and lost interest as they scrolled 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 skim it—only 19 percent of people read an entire newsletter. It gets worse: Skimmers don’t even skim the whole newsletter. 35 percent of the time, they skim only parts of the newsletter. And, almost no one reads the introduction. OK, 33 percent do, but you might as well skip it.