The National Science Learning Centre is part of a network of 10 centres dedicated to providing professional development for science teaching practitioners across the UK.

Their monthly secondary education newsletter is sent to over 10,000 contacts and aims to recruit delegates to courses, raise awareness of the resources on offer and increase traffic to their web-portal.

The March edition achieved both open and click-through rates of 39% - not quite as high as the centre had hoped. It was also anticipated that more people would have subscribed to the courses promoted.

Analysis

1. The purpose of this email is not immediately clear – why you have received it – why you should look at it. There is no title, headline or date.
2. 'In this issue' needs to offer real benefits to reading any further. Currently these links either don't make sense or offer any benefit. For example 'Climate Change' offers no benefits. 'Sustainability' makes no sense.
3. The content is not grouped in any way that makes sense, making it difficult to understand and take in the information presented. Courses and resources are randomly placed throughout the newsletter.
4. There is too much content. When users open an email newsletter they scan very, very quickly to see if it contains anything that will help them achieve a particular task. The more content there is, the more difficult it is to scan to find what you want.
5. The content isn't focused. There is a lot of 'filler' content which could either be written more tightly or placed on the website as it constitutes 'further information'. Again this makes it difficult to scan and find what you want.
6. The content doesn't clearly describe the benefit of what it is offering. Research has shown that readers will only scan the first few words of a headline and perhaps the first half of the first sentence in the first paragraph. If you don't use the words which describe the benefits they are looking for here, they will move on.
7. The 'call to action' links for each article are lost in the text. In some cases you are asked to click on the title before you have even read the article. They could miss some vital information such as their eligibility. Making the title a link doesn't tell you what you will achieve by clicking it. Will you find further information, be able to apply for a course or perhaps a definition for the word?
8. There are too many large images which add no value. The photographs have been taken too far from the centre of attention. You often can't see people's faces or what they are doing. Images in this situation are about communicating a message: by including the whole room and every person they don't manage to communicate anything.
9. The 'More' part of the 'More About Us' link in the navigation at the top isn't necessary, particularly as you haven't told them anything about you at that stage.