With all the hype surrounding how to use email for internet business, I was pleasantly surprised to find someone who believes in doing the research and formulating conservative, realistic conclusions.

Jakob Nielsen and Amy Schade of the Nielsen-Norman Group (nngroup.com) spearheaded some very enlightening research about how users view and handle email. It’s the most impressive work on the subject I’ve encountered. One of the major points that supports the advice from experts in the email marketing arena is that the average user spends less than 52 seconds scanning an email before deciding whether to read it.

That means … you need to capture your reader with the headline and a couple of sub-heads or your email hits the bit-bucket!

Here are some excerpts from the executive summary:

The most significant finding from our usability research on email newsletters is that users have highly emotional reactions to them …

To assess how people use email newsletters, we conducted three rounds of user studies.

Sixty-nine percent of users said that they look forward to receiving at least one newsletter, and most users said a newsletter had become part of their routine. Very few other promotional efforts can claim this degree of customer buy-in.

The first study focused on testing newsletter usability in terms of subscribing, unsubscribing, and maintaining the user’s account.

We conducted our second study remotely, using a diary methodology …

We conducted the third study using an eyetracker.

You can find the executive summary on the Nielsen Norman Group Web Site.