The hegemony of big type
Headlines are all that matter in a newsletter. Well, sort of.
Most of your audience will predictably do two things and nothing else, studies show. Most will look at the photos and about half the headlines. Then they’re done with that issue for good, unless something hooked their special interest.
A complete skim takes just a few seconds. It's not much of a customer service experience for the reader. You're just something they quickly glanced at, then threw away.
People's attention spans: those are the mean streets. Research published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine found that goldfish have an average attention span of nine seconds. Humans in 2013 had an average attention span of eight seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2000 (I blame smart phones). I'm not making this up.
People skim everything. Relatively few read deep, eye-motion studies show. It's safest to assume that any messaging buried in the body copy (the small type) will go undetected by the majority of your readers.