Commune Media | Measurably Effective Digital Marketing™

Optimize email content to strengthen service and trust

Posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 5:27 PM by Simon Smith  |  Comments (0)

If you send customers confirmation emails, shipping emails or other "transactional" messages, take note.

Unless you adhere to stringent guidelines (about 143, to be exact), your emails likely aren’t effectively servicing customers, building trust and strengthening relationships.

Worse yet, they might just be junked in the spam folder.

Challenges for transactional email content

The findings come in a transactional email study from the usability doctor, Jakob Nielsen.

It compared results with a similar study from five years ago.

And it concluded not only that email usability is still "appallingly" low, but also that users demand even more than five years ago because they’re more skeptical and more rushed.

That’s not entirely surprising, since transactional email must compete in clogged inboxes, and few people have time to relax and review messages in detail.

Rather, we take shortcuts to determine what’s important.

To cut through the clutter, you need to use proven email content optimization tactics.

Unfortunately, according to Nielsen (whose group analyzed 92 transactional messages for this study), emails often consist of "copy written by the programmer late at night."

Either that or sledgehammer marketing content written by aggressive salespeople.

Neither of which do much to build long-lasting customer relationships.

Content optimization for automatic email messages

The latest study confirms the findings from five years ago, but nearly doubles the number of recommendations due to more challenging users.

Your goal with transactional email is to avoid being mistaken for spam, be a customer service ambassador and reduce calls from customers by anticipating and addressing their questions.

But you’re competing against tough obstacles. Nielsen notes that processing email is stressful, users see fluff as a waste of time, and they’ll ignore (or junk) anything deemed inessential. In fact, only 12% of users in this study opened spam messages—and 80% failed to open a legitimate message from Walgreens because a vague subject line made it appear to be spam.

So here are some ways to cut through the clutter:

1. Convey your brand name and purpose in the "from" field. For example, "JetBlue Reservations" and "BestBuy Online Store" were highly effective in this study. Because they told the user the email was from a reputable source, and explained their reason for arriving. And here’s an important tip: Keep your "from" line between 20 and 25 characters because most email programs truncate the rest.
2. Relate to customer-initiated transactions in the "subject" line. For example, "TiVo Rewards Program Ends May 28" performed well while the spam-like "Important Information" performed poorly.
3. Keep the body brief and user-focused. Provide the information that matters most to users up top. (Keep any overt marketing messages, if you must have them, to the end.) Examples of user-focused information include tracking numbers, order descriptions and information about how to deal with any problems.
4. Send fewer emails. For an online purchase, for example, one email confirming the purchase and another confirming shipping would be ideal. The more emails you send regarding a transaction, the more confused you make your customers.

Is it worth the effort?

As a highly personal medium, email enables one of the most direct relationships you can have with customers. So poorly optimized email content is a missed opportunity to create happier customers, build stronger relationships and reduce support costs.

And for transactional emails that you send out regularly, that’s an opportunity you’re missing again and again.

Tags: copywriting, email, email marketing, transactional email, usability