RSS Feeds Are No Match to Email Newsletters, Says Nielsen

Internet usability 'guru' Jakob Nielsen has conducted another survey using his new darling -- eye-tracking technologies. Now he claims that, although being quite an efficient way to syndicate site's content, RSS news feed can not successfully compete against good old e-mail newsletters.





In its press release, Nielsen Norman Group says that e-mail newsletters do much better job 'at building a relationship between a company and its customers'.

The researchers found that an average user spend only about 51 seconds to read an e-mail. More than that, only 19% of the letters received are being read fully, while other 4/5 of the bunch just gets a quick scan and then go to duct bin or moved to archive. Eye-tracking observations show that RSS headlines fare even worse.

From Nielsen's point of view, an e-mail lets a business make ten times more money, than a RSS feed.

In his report, Nielsen recommends to stick to two basic principles of building a newsletter service: make it easy to unsubscribe so the user does not need to get the newsletter shitlisted in his/her antispam software, and make it easy to scan so the recipient doesn't waste his/her time trying to find the point of the topic. This is essential for a newsletter's survival, says Nielsen.

See also:

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