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Unsubscribe in 1.38 minutes? How about 2 seconds!
A recent study from the Nielsen Norman Group has got me about as confused as a woodpecker in a concrete forest. Now, I haven’t yet seen the whole study, but I’ve read the press release, the executive summary, and a whole bunch of blog posts covering the news - ZDNet Blog and PaidContent and MediaPost.
First off, the advice that the report gives re: putting together a good email newsletter looks solid. The study provides an impressive 165 design guidelines based on usability tests of 228 email newsletters. It’s the comments on RSS that have me scratching my head.
While the report focuses minimally on RSS with just one chapter, the press release chooses to throw down the gauntlet in the headline: “RSS Feeds Are No Marketing Substitute for E-Mail Newsletters, Reports Nielsen Norman Group.”
In a report that purports to be about guidance for E-Mail newsletter design, why use the press to attack a new medium that the report itself claims is basically unknown among study participants? I’ll tell you why. Because RSS is a very serious threat to email marketing.
Is RSS perfect? Far from it. The report has some strong findings and Nielsen makes good suggestions such as renaming RSS for the consumer, by just calling it “news feeds” or simply “feeds.”
But Nielsen and email newsletter publishers would be well served to heed their own advice. A key recommendation of the report is that “convenience rules.” MediaPost cites the following stat as an example of email newsletters becoming more convenient for the user:
Avoid the spam filter by making it easy for people to unsubscribe to newsletters they no longer wish to receive. In its first e-mail usability study, Nielsen Norman Group observed that it took people an average of 3.5 minutes to unsubscribe from an e-mail newsletter. Now, it takes 1.38 minutes. When people can easily unsubscribe to a newsletter, they are less likely to resort to using a spam-blocking feature, which can cause legitimate newsletters to get blacklisted.
1.38 minutes is convenient?
I know there has never been a study done on the time it takes to unsubscribe to an RSS feed, but the simple act of pressing the unsubscribe or delete button can’t take more than 2 seconds, and I’m being generous here. It’s all about putting the user in control and making the interface and process of managing content as simple and intuitive as possible… 1.38 minutes to get your name off an email list is not simple, intuitive or convenient.
RSS has a way to go before it becomes mainstream, but it will become mainstream. And instead of turning publishers off of RSS, Nielsen should encourage experimentation - maybe suggest 165 ways to make RSS ‘warmer’ for readers. RSS is not about replacing the email newsletter, and the criteria for evaluating newsletter quality shouldn’t be used to judge RSS. RSS, simply put, is a new way of publishing that puts the user in control in a way that email will never be able to replicate. Oh, and it’s spam-free.
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Good thoughts Bill. I also see the “creative headline writing” angle here. As much as I admire the way they “hooked” us, your thoughts are right.
None of this is going to matter until we lose the term RSS and replace it with “favorites” or something, which I’m hoping Vista will solve. That’s when the majority change will happen.
Perhaps I need to write a piece entitled “Microsoft Vista Will Save RSS”?
Hey Bill- good point regarding the unsubscription time as small, and yet still long. I also wonder that they don’t bring personal information, and the lack of security into the picture. That would be far better incentive for most consumers too, if they thought about it.
I had the same thoughts over at my site a week back. I thought using an email newsletter study to examine RSS and then publish the results was not very helpful. Only the third part of the study even looked at RSS and the majority people had no idea what RSS meant.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric