Archive - Usability RSS Feed

Larry Chase’s 9 Best Practices for Publishing an Email Newsletter

April 24, 2007 in Online Strategy, Training, Usability with 0 Comments

I found this while doing research for tonight’s LI presentation. I took out two of them that I didn’t think where relevant to non-profits or political organizations, but Chase’s summary really does give an overview of things to watch for when developing your email publishing.

Here is the inside track on what to pay attention to when publishing your email newsletter, and what to stay away from.

#1: What’s Your Agenda? Before your content, before your subscriber acquisition strategy, you must think long and hard about who your target audience is and what your agenda is with them. Is this a customer retention strategy for your existing clients? Is it a thought leadership gambit? Or is your newsletter designed to generate sales?

#2. What can you give them that they don’t already have? The trouble with most email newsletters nowadays is they blur together. Very few distinguish themselves. Look at what’s already out there and resolve not to reinvent the wheel. Do something fresh. If your core business isn’t publishing, you would do well to hire an outsider to help you ascertain what information you have that the rest of the world wants to know about.

You may be best served by acquiring content from outside sources. If so, make sure it isn’t the “same old, same old” content that your target audience already sees somewhere else.

#3. Shop Around for an Email Service Bureau: Make sure they are solvent. Price is not the determining factor here. Yes, I know everyone thinks this is a commoditized service, but I don’t care. What good is it if you get the best price and the bureau goes out of business or lays off much or all of its tech support staff? Which brings me to another point.

Before signing on with an email service provider, get at least three recommendations from that bureau. Remember, they’re going to give you referrals that give glowing reports. So do try to locate some users or former users who will give it to you straight. Also keep in mind the email service bureau business is fraught with complexity, with more being added all the time due to authentication systems coming online. The point is, be tough-minded, but be reasonable. Put calls into their tech support lines to see how responsive they are. If you’re paying $9.95 a month to send one million emails out, don’t be shocked if there’s no tech support on Sunday evening.

#4. Pay Attention to Reputation: It’s imperative you protect your domain name reputation. Publish your SPF records and look into a reputation service like Habeas. Such a service is quite likely to increase your email deliverability, open rates, clickthrough rates and so on.

Click here to subscribe free to Larry Chase’s Web Digest for Marketers Email Newsletter

#5. Develop a Subscriber Acquisition Strategy: You need one. Why? Because people unsubscribe from email newsletters at the drop of a hat. People leave their jobs and change their email addresses, too. So unless you have a plan for getting new subscribers, you’ll find the size of your list shrinking before too long. The average churn rate nowadays can easily be higher than 30%. Hereunder are a few sub-tips for boosting your subscriber registration numbers.

1. Put your subscription box near the top of your home page. Seems obvious, right? But then why do so many miss this one?
2. Offer a juicy incentive. Over 20,000 people have downloaded my “Essential Search Engine Resource Guide.” This guide also gets passed along and serves as my emissary, which causes more people to subscribe.
3. Only ask for the email address at first. If you want more information about your subscribers, offer additional incentives within the newsletter down the road. Remember, each additional piece of information you ask for up front severely cuts down on your acquisition rate. On the other hand, some newsletter publishers will ignore this sub-tip, since more information makes for a more qualified list.
4. Display your privacy policy clearly and prominently. This is one of the most popular links on my site, along with the next one…
5. Display a sample issue. People like to see what they’re signing up for before they hand over their email address. I do. Don’t you?

#6. Subject Lines Are Critical: Everyone is trying to get their inboxes down to whatever magic number makes them comfortable. Your subject line needs to stop the reader from the repetitive motion of hitting that delete key that gets them to that very short-term goal. Keep you subject lines short.

Many people (specifically in B2B) are using the Internet to find something out or learn how to do something. No wonder I see “How to” subject headers blow the doors off response rates. Real news works, too. The more specific, the better. In short, tell me something I don’t already know. Don’t try to fill me up with a bunch of self-serving corporate pap.

#7. Look & Feel: Make it easy for the reader to skim your newsletter. Let’s face it, most people skim email. If they really do slow down and read your newsletter, good for you. But assume your readers are pressed for time every bit as much as you are. The more control you give them, the more they’ll appreciate it, whether consciously or unconsciously. My Web Digest For Marketers is designed in short info chunks. You can helicopter around to your heart’s content without losing continuity. People love that control. If you force the reader into clicking too many times or filling out too many forms to get at what he or she wants, you will be dropped like a hot potato. It’s similar to being routed around and around on one of those annoying phone systems.

#8. Read Your Newsletter Out Loud: Sounds silly, right? But unless you’re comfortable actually speaking the words you write, your newsletter “voice” will come across as phony. In fact, try to have your newsletter come from somebody in your organization, instead of just your company name. Look, the Internet is a pretty impersonal place. One good way to get above this intense clutter is to be human, and to talk like one.

#9. Keep It Fresh: Each year, I usually introduce something new. Here’s an example. Time was when an issue of Web Digest contained the latest and greatest marketing websites that we found for you that week. In house, we called those issues, “Surf ‘n’ Turf.” But now each issue is focused on one thing and one thing only. It may be PPC, or Email Deliverability, or SEO, or Increasing Response Rates, et al. Both advertisers and readers alike love this editorial approach.

Summation: The Internet is not one medium. It’s a bundle of media. Email newsletters are one strand in that bundle. They’re an extraordinarily cost-effective way of decimating information because just about anybody you want to reach now has an email inbox.

When done right, publishing an email newsletter is absolutely one of the most efficient allocations of your online media budget. The trick is to do it right. If you need help doing it right, get in touch with me and I’ll work with you on a consulting basis to get your newsletter launched on a solid and profitable trajectory.

Share

Web Development and Usability: Sweating the small stuff

April 14, 2007 in Blogs & Blogging, Usability, Web Design with 0 Comments

Interesting blog post over at Silas Notes. Blogger Rhea quotes Jakob Nielsen, who said:

“Of course, it’s important to get the big things right, or you won’t have any users. But getting the small things right enhances usability and fosters user comfort.”

I’ll ad to that. From personal experience, there are a few other important things to consider when evaluating how much attention to put to the small things. First, what a user considers a small thing versus a big thing is very subjective. You might think its no big deal, and the user might think its a major mistake. Consider what Facebook developers thought was a cool new feature–small stuff for a cutting edge development team.

The problem was a new option called News Feed, which creates regular reports about the activity within a network or group of friends. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it set off a revolt in the Facebook community. Users felt that their personal information was being broadcast all over the Web without their permission. Never mind that they had posted it all publicly themselves. Or that it went only to people who were friends or already in their networks. Facebook is a fast-moving, throw-it-up-and-see-if-it-works sort of place that typically adds a feature, watches how people use it, and, based on feedback, adds things such as extra privacy controls. But this time, Zuckerberg and his crew had made a mistake by not putting privacy features in place first.

Taking advantage of another new feature, which allowed individuals to start their own issue-oriented “global groups,” disgruntled users set up a group they called Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook). Ironically, the News Feed service itself then spread the campaign (“Your friend has just joined this group!”). In less than 48 hours, 700,000 people had joined the protest, and the blogosphere declared it the end of Facebook.

The story didn’t end that way, and Facebook seems to have recovered just fine, but it illustrates in today’s wired world how quickly a small mistake can turn into a huge mistake.

My second insight is that it seems that when engineers start getting careless because they are trying to “not let the perfect be the enemy of the good” little bugs start slipping through. So, its always healthy to make developers pay attention to small stuff. It keeps them on their toes, and alert to the details, and potentially prevents major problems from occurring later in the development process — the cause of embarrassing delays.

Of course, my guess is that Rhea was referring to interface design and usability. But I have to totally agree with Jakob: “…getting the small things right enhances usability and fosters user comfort.” This is also true in the area of functionality development. Design the tools right from the start, beta test it to see how human’s respond to the page flow, navigation, validation and site feedback, and then be willing to go back and tweak things to make sure its right. It makes a difference, even if your users don’t can’t always pin-point it.

P.S. I think breadcrumbs are cool too. You can read the full article on breadcrumb navigation from Jakob Nielsen’s website right here.

UPDATE: I went over to Jakob’s site after posting the above comments, and read his article titled “Does User Annoyance Matter?” He says something that is key to understand about the “small stuff” that comes up in web development, “Annoyances matter, because they compound.”

If the offending state-field drop-down were a site’s only usability violation, I’d happily award the site a gold star for great design. But sites invariably have a multitude of other annoyances, each of which delays users, causes small errors, or results in other unpleasant experiences.

A site that has many user-experience annoyances:

* appears sloppy and unprofessional,
* demands more user time to complete tasks than competing sites that are less annoying, and
* feels somewhat jarring and unpleasant to use, because each annoyance disrupts the user’s flow.

Even if no single annoyance stops users in their tracks or makes them leave the site, the combined negative impact of the annoyances will make users feel less satisfied. Next time they have business to conduct, users are more likely to go to other sites that make them feel better.

Share
Page 2 of 2«12