The most valued email newsletters in the Nielsen Norman Group’s latest round of usability studies used these formats:

1. Headlines with short blurbs. This was, by far, the most favored format.

If you have more than 5 topics or articles, consider:

• A concise headline
• Blurbs ranging from 1 line to 2-4 sentences to even a few brief paragraphs
• Link to the full story for more information

If your email newsletter also covers more than 2 printed pages, add a table of contents.

2. Bulleted lists of information such as upcoming events, discounts and specials.

3. Single-story newsletters, such as daily meditations, articles, recipes, promotions, promotion, recipes or events. Include the full story if you use this approach.

Make them short and focused.

Note that all of these formats are short and focused. Subscribers considered newsletters with too much information or diverse content overwhelming and cluttered.

Note: Include no more than two full-length stories in your email newsletter. Keep them tight.

Be consistent.

Whatever format you choose, be consistent. Subscribers learn your format and use it to find what they’re looking for.

Subscribers also valued in email newsletters:

• Relevant, interesting information
• Clean, easy-to-use design, little clutter
• High-quality graphics and images
• Few ads

Subscribers did not value in email newsletters:

• E-commerce or sales newsletters
• Irrelevant, impersonal information
• Frilly design
• Unsolicited newsletters

What format do you use for your email newsletter? What format makes the most sense?

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Source: Kim Flaherty, Amy Schade, and Jakob Nielsen; Marketing Email and Newsletter Design to Increase Conversion and Loyalty, 6th Edition; Nielsen Norman Group, 2017

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When the Federal Trade Commission needed to explain why the agency has decided not to develop a do-not-spam registry — officials feared that spammers would target people on the list — a spokesperson said:

“You’ll be spammed if we do — and spammed if we don’t.”

How can you craft such a good pun or play on words? One approach is to list, rhyme and twist. Here’s how:

1. List.

Write down the key or topic words from your article.

Then expand your list. The more words, the better. Try synonyms, antonyms and different forms of your keyword — spam, spams, spammed and spamming, for instance.

Visual Thesaurus and OneLook Reverse Dictionary are great tools for adding words to your list.

2. Rhyme.

Use rhyming dictionaries to find words that sound similar to your keywords. My favorite is RhymeZone.

Keep looking. RhymeZone doesn’t recognize “spammed.” But it did send me to OneLook Dictionary Search for words ending in “ammed.” (Input “*ammed.”)

I searched for one of them — slammed — back at RhymeZone, which gave me this list: crammed, dammed, damned, jammed, rammed, scammed.

Next, find phrases that include those rhyming words at Phrase Thesaurus or ClichéSite.com. In fact, I found another starting point for the FTC sound bite by doing this research:

Publish and be damned.

3. Twist.

Now substitute your key word for the rhyming word. Make it:

Publish and be spammed.

List, rhyme and twist in action.

This approach can result in headlines covering …

… The Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton ranking best hotel in the United States in a reader poll:

How the Ritz Was One

… A couple of new movie theaters being built in the same neighborhood:

Coming soon: Two theaters near you

… Turbulent Spanish elections:

New Reign in Spain

… A consultant hiring a personal trainer after he hit a plateau working out on his own:

My muscles, so to speak, had grown accustomed to the pace.

… A blistering (and bearish) week in August:

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Economy

The launch of Playboy.com:

Silly Rabbit, These Clicks Aren’t For Kids

Choose fluent words.

The best words to play with are fluent words — that is, they’re short (one syllable’s best), sweet and easy to pronounce.

That’s why the first step in wordplay is to expand your word list by finding related words. For a story on how to manage your inheritance without making common missteps, for instance, the word in my head was “inherit” — not very fluent. So I ran it through OneLook Reverse Dictionary and landed on the word “heir.”

Now, “heir” may be one of the best words to play with in the English language. That’s because “heir”:

• Is a homophone that sounds like err and air. That makes it easy to sub a soundalike, like:

Err apparent

• Looks as if it sounds like hair, which makes it easy to list and twist:

Bad hair day

• Rhymes with dozens of words, including care, dare, fair, pair, prayer, rare, scare, share and their — all good candidates for listing, rhyming and twisting.
• Looks as if it could be pronounced here, which allows more listing and twisting:

Heir today, gone tomorrow

• Is short, sweet and easy to pronounce.

Don’t wait for the muse.

Some lucky communicators are natural-born phrase twisters. I have to substitute systems and processes for talent.

If you’re like me, list, rhyme and twist key words in your next story for a sassy sound bite or surprising headline.

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Lists comprise some of history’s most memorable content — from Moses’ 10 Commandments to Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, from Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits to Ben Franklin’s 13 Virtues.

• Shakespeare coined the term “list,” in Hamlet. “List, list, O, list!” wrote the Bard.
• Wallace Stevens and Johnny Cash turned lists into an art form.
• (Want more examples? Here’s a list of literary lists.)

So here, of course, is a list of the top five reasons to list lists. Use a numbered or bulleted list when you want to:

1. Get attention.

People can’t resist a list.

Lists “are to the web reader’s eye what Brad Pitt is to the paparazzi,” say Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen, the authors of How People Read on the Web. “You just can’t get enough.”

That’s because lists make skimmers’ jobs easier and draw the eye. Indeed, according to Pernice et al., web visitors look at 70% of the bulleted lists they encounter.

As a result, lists and other “unconventional” approaches (including Q&As, timelines and short sidebars) get 15% more attention than the average story, according to The Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack07 study.

2. Give journalists what they want.

Why make us work so hard? kvetch journalists surveyed for a study by Greentarget.

These folks are frustrated that they’re too often forced to hunt through long rivers of gray text to find the news. No wonder more than half of them said they’d find it helpful to have a bulleted list of key facts in a release. And more than one-third more were open to the idea.

So give reporters what they want: Add bullets. While you’re at it, why not add subheads, bold-faced lead-ins, callouts and other display copy to make it easy for reporters and others to scan your release?

3. Reach nonreaders with words.

Good lists lift ideas off the page for skimmers and scanners.

Web visitors “have come to realize that bulleted lists do some of the work for them,” write Pernice et al., “so they don’t have to read as much text to get the main idea.”

4. Make messages easier to understand.

Readers also understand lists better than conventional articles, according to Eyetrack07.

5. Get remembered.

And readers remember lists longer than conventional articles, according to Eyetrack07.

That may be because humans process information spatially. Leave your grocery list at home, for instance, and you’ll probably still remember most of its items, because you recall where they were located on the list.

So your readers won’t forget: Please remember, write a list.

6. Cut Through the Clutter.

Bulleted lists help you:

• Break up full sentences to make them easier to read and understand.
• Make paragraphs look easier to read so more people read them.
• Write more concisely, because they eliminate the need for transitions.

Bottom line: If you have a series of three or more items in a sentence or paragraph, make it a list. If you find that your article has become a list of lists, you need more stories, examples, exposition and other types of information.

Lists grab attention, but lists of lists — and, worse, multilevel lists — can be tedious and exhausting. No wonder Pernice, et. al, found that people pay less attention to each subsequent list on a webpage.

When to use a bulleted list

What is the purpose of a bulleted list? Use lists when you want to grab attention, get the word out to skimmers and scammers, and make your message more concise and memorable.

Learn more about listing lists

Should you use bullet points or numbered lists? Complete sentences with full stops or partial sentences? How can you format the items on a list to reach skimmer and scanners? And how do you punctuate lists anyway?

Find out more about how to create a list for business writing.

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Sources: Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton, and Jakob Nielsen; How People Read on the Web: The Eyetracking Evidence; Nielsen Norman Group; Sept. 10, 2013

Dr. Pegie Stark Adam, Sara Quinn and Rick Edmonds, Eyetracking The News, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, 2007

George A. Miller, “Psychology and Information,” ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation,1993

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