Limit the Message Size

Created on 2001-09-17 by Rainer Gerhards.

People pay their ISPs to receive your email newsletters! Always keep this in mind. Most people are charged either by the amount of traffic they generate or the time connected. Only very few have unlimited Internet access at a flat fee.

Keep the size of your email messages as low as you can. Show you care about your subscribers by allowing them to download your messages fast. They will appreciate this. If it takes to long to download your newsletter, subscribers will cancel the download and unsubscribe from it. This is especially the case in mobile or remote access environments, where people only have very limited bandwidth.

But it is not only a technical problem. People can only process a given amount of information at one time. This is especially the case with a newsletter. Sure, your subscribers have interest in the topics you offer. Thus they are subscribed. But I'll bet you will not receive the same priority and attention like a an e-learning course. As such, people tend to scan over your message. If it looks to large - looks like it takes too much effort to read - they will delay reading it (or delete it directly). Remember what happened when you delayed reading a newsletter the last time? Exactly. You never read it.

If you overdo your newsletter, you'll loose awareness. So be sure to limit the size of it. A good strategy is to provide just a limited set of information and publish more frequently. Simply split a single issue and make multiple issues out of it. A good example is CNN: with their news updates, they simply send out a single news message.