We've just been setting up e-mail newsletters for a couple of clients. We've been focusing on the design and the technical setup, but it's raised the question of what makes a good e-mail newsletter? After a bit of research, here are some key bits of advice:

1) People seem to react more emotionally to newsletters than to websites. They see them as a personal communication. This is good news if you can use them to create a good ongoing relationship. The potential catch is that you can upset your customers if you're not sensitive about how you use them.

2) The e-mail must be designed for users who scan. The average time spent reading will only be about 51 secs. Make sure you have clear headlines that help people to quickly decide if your news is relevant. Keep the e-mail short with links to your website for further information.

3) Newsletters should be targeted at particular information, problems or situations. Most of us are overwhelmed by e-mail. We only want news if it's helpful and relevant.

4) Users often stay subscribed, even though they're not interested, and then get more and more annoyed by each new issue. This is obviously not good for customer relations. The unsubscribe process must be simple and obvious. We help you do this by making sure there's an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every newsletter. If you're sending out a newsletter to a large number of people, you may want an even more obvious unsubscribe at the top of the e-mail.

5) A new subscriber should be able to subscribe in less than a minute. This sounds obvious, but a test showed that it can take about 4 mins to subscribe on some sites! That's enough to put someone off. Think about where you want to put a subscription link and use a really simple subscription process. Remember, the less information you request, the more likely you are to actually get someone to sign up.