Okay, maybe communication never truly left … but our awareness of it has grown keen as we shape effective customer experiences in interactive media. Recently, Donovan (Director of User Experience) gave a presentation about web 2.0’s impact on the landscape of user (customer) experience.  He convincingly described how web 2.0 capabilities evolved as a response to user needs and allow the web to become, among other things, the communication medium people envisioned 10 years ago.

In this changed landscape of customer experience, what is communication exactly?  How do we ensure customers not only get our messages but also find them relevant and convincing?  How do we coordinate messages across multiple channels to deepen our relationships with customers?

As a start toward answering such questions, I just published “Rediscovering Communication“ for the online magazine UXmatters.  Please add your insights as we journey through this exciting landscape together.

While doing a little research on email marketing, I came across this nifty site called EmailStatCenter.com.  Since I found it to be helpful, I wanted to pass it along to you guys.  This site is the first centralized online repository of statistics and research specific to the email marketing industry, with a broad range of topics included. 

EmailStatCenter.com provides statistical information for those looking for quick facts, but also provides the name of the reports if you’d like to research further.  Let’s face it, if you’re trying to convince people there’s value to an email marketing program, stats will be extremely helpful in your argument.

Here are some facts that I found particularly interesting:

• Of the largest online retailers that send welcome emails, 69% of them send their welcome emails in HTML, while the remaining 31% sent theirs in text-only format. - Email Experience Council/RetailEmail.Blogspot (September 2006)
• 55.3% of marketers surveyed currently use, or plan on using an outside vendor for email marketing. - Datran Media Research, “The 2007 Email Marketing Survey: Looking Forward” (2007)
• 56% of the world’s heaviest online advertisers revealed that they had budgeted significantly for landing-page A/B tests in 2007. -MarketingSherpa (2007)
• The majority of marketers annually allocate less than $250,000 to each of the discrete email functions of acquisition, retention and creative. - JupiterResearch “E-mail Spending and Governance 2007″ (2007)
• U.S. marketers spent $300 million on email in 2005. - 2006 Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, WebTrends
  

When it comes to words and the web, you may have heard less usually is more. What you may not have heard? How on earth to do it. Here’s the nitty gritty on 4 tactics for content that’s nice and concise.

• Use the Right Subjects and Verbs
  Writing style guru Joseph Williams recommends viewing each sentence as a story. Readers expect main characters to be subjects and their main actions to be verbs. Not only is this structure more clear, it’s also more concise. In the After example below, Spunlogic is the main character.
  Before: There has been a green initiative launched at Spunlogic.
  After: Spunlogic launched a green initiative.
• Don’t Be Redundant, and Don’t Be Redundant
  Spotting redundancy can be fun, and the fix is easy.
  Obvious: Orange in color, period in time
  Implied: Imagine a picture
• Avoid Meaningless Modifiers
  Basically, you really, really want to stay away from virtually all the various modifiers that don’t add meaning. (Translation: Stay away from modifers that don’t add meaning.)
• Why Use a Phrase When a Word Will Do?
  The more carefully you choose your words, the fewer words you have to use. Here’s an example.
  Don’t use this: Due to the fact that
  Use this: Because

You are a marketer. You send a promotional email - time-sensitive, special deal - only to find that the click-through rate was abyssmal. As you begin the witch-hunt for why the message performed so poorly, you discover that Your ESP and their email server are found to be innocent. 

What if your creative piece is responsible? In this age of image-blocking, the importance of email usability is magnified. To illustrate my point, I submit these three samples:

Exhibit A:  The worst case scenario and truly the default view in Outlook 2007 (and the way this email first appeared in my inbox).

Exhibit B: What happens to the email when it is delivered to Outlook 2007 with a common preview pane size and images turned on (today’s lowest common denominator for email software due to it’s MS Word-based rendering engine)

You see who it’s from, but you’ve probably seen other stuff from them.  You’re probably still left thinking, “So what?”

Exhibit C: The designer’s intended creative execution of a promotional email.

Bottom Line:  Send emails designed like this one back to the kitchen every time. Your emails will perform better and you’ll know that you’ve optimized for usability. 

Welcoming the Customer with Communication Done Right
In Part I, I described the challenges large corporations face in communicating effectively with customers throughout the customer lifecycle.  I also showed an example of addressing these challenges through content management only, not communication, in customer support. Well in Part Deux, I’m happy to present an example of meeting these challenges well at the critical “welcome” stage.   

Enter the Cingular Service Summary (CSS).  This document (generic version shown) reaches the hands of every new customer and every customer who upgrades/renews a contract—well over 50 million customers since its release in 2005, about 750,000 customers a day.  This highly personalized, dynamically generated document is printed on the fly in the stores, e-mailed to customers, and posted on the website.  It has two purposes:

• Summarize what the customer bought
• Educate the customer about specific issues and questions (bill amount, voicemail set up, etc.) in an easy-to-understand way.

I toiled to redesign this document during a past life with an excellent team at Cingular Wireless (now AT&T).  I’d like to give it a final salute before it evolves into its AT&T form.  Here are a few reasons why I think the CSS is an example of communication mostly done right:

• Concision – Largely because of the reasons listed below, we reduced the original CSS from 2 pages (front and back) to 1 page (front and back).
• Personalized, relevant information – Thanks to sophisticated technology and complex user scenarios, the content of the document changes depending on the user’s account and transaction type.  Also, we deleted information that didn’t summarize the transaction or educate the customer.
• Clearly organized and prioritized – Like information is consolidated in clearly labeled sections. 
• Polished visual design that clarifies the document’s organization – Clear headers, shading, icons, and more make the document easy to scan, and they clearly convey priority.
• Legalese and technical jargon minimized; plain language maximized - At least as best we could with a service as complex as wireless. 
• A start toward consistent, cross-channel communication – This document appears in e-mail and on the web.  It also served as the basis for redesigning materials sent to customers who order online, over the phone, and through other channels.  

Results? Increased customer satisfaction on industry-wide measures and cost savings from reduced calls to the call center.  Also, in surveys customers reported remembering and keeping the CSS, whereas before they reported not realizing they received one.  The document was such a success that Cingular’s Chief Technology Officer (now the CIO for AT&T) mentioned it in his editorial about customer-driven innovation.  

Doing communication right isn’t always easy, but it pays for everyone.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my insurance agent on the phone and I mentioned that I was going on vacation.  At the end of the call, she said to me “Have a great vacation”.  I automatically replied “You Too!!”… then laughed.  I was so used to hearing someone say “have a great day” or something similar that I reacted first and thought later.  Any of you that are Brian Reagan fans will recognize why I thought this was so funny.  He’s a comedian that does a bit about saying the wrong thing at the right time (audio clip in QuickTime.  Seriously, listen to it – it’s worth it!).  It got me thinking about saying the appropriate thing to the appropriate people.

I’m currently taking classes online at Drexel and they constantly send me emails about ‘on campus’ events and parking passes, an announcement obviously meant for people that live in and around Philadelphia.  It would be so easy to just create a database of people who obviously don’t live in PA and filter out those folks when they send these emails.  All they need is a zip code!  It often baffles me why more companies don’t take the time to clean up their data so they’re not saying something ‘inappropriate’ to their audience.  I’ve started ignoring all emails from Drexel – and every once in a while I miss something important.  But, it’s just not worth my time to have to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Drexel should do that for me – at least to some extent.

Marketers and sales people will do crazy things to get your information.  Technology has made it easier to find new and creative ways to do so… visit a web site? Your email may be grabbed without you even knowing it.  In meatspace, your credit card can be used to link together your personal data into a mailing address (and other things). 

Before you all call the tinfoil hat police, let me explain.  Like a crack addict jonesing for a fix, sometimes marketers lose perspective on what lead capturing is all about.  In your rush to meet some sort of misguided sales goal, marketers take heed:  just because you can track a customer, or potential customer, it doesn’t mean you should. 

It’s become commonplace nowadays for all of us to have a few plastic dongles on our keychains for supermarkets, record stores, and wherever you crazy kids shop nowadays.  We accept this. For a few cents off canned peas, we’ll let them track everything about all our purchases to be scrutinized and analyzed for greater sales yields.  (It annoys you that you’ve done this, don’t deny it.)  What about permission-based lead capture on ‘the interwebs’?  To me, there is nothing worse than traveling through a series of tubes, only to be blocked by a page requiring me to enter my name, my email, my income, and my bank account number -  for the Prince of Nigeria for all I know. 

What good marketers should be asking is: What do we lose when we ask for this information?  How many customers are turned off from a brand because the lead you are squeezing out of them for that drop of content is just too much?  Forcing users to sign up before reading an online newspaper article, forcing users to give information before you can access any sort of web content: it’s bad for usability and it hurts the overall brand experience.  Wouldn’t you rather have people visit your content, be completely excited about it and forward the bejeezus out of the link?  This would be bringing you more ad revenue, but not more precious leads.  Well, let me remind you:  quantity does not mean quality.  Wouldn’t you rather people like your content so much they voluntarily subscribed to an email newsletter about related content?  It may be fewer leads, but they would be more relevant.

Let me put it this way:  For a user of your site, it’s like showing up for the free day at the state fair and then finding that there’s a $10 cover charge.  You end up going, “Aww, man…” and then you and your friends go wander around the Wal-Mart for a couple of hours instead.  There will be sites out there that get it, employ laissez faire lead capture and ultimately have a better user experience and more return users.  Isn’t that what it’s all about? 

I was in Barnes and Noble the other day looking for a book for one of my classes when I happened upon the bargain table (LOVE the bargain table). I have collected books ever since my English Literature Major days, and now have an extensive library. So, when I get a chance to add to it, I do. There is an author who writes about Western Pennsylvania (where I’m from) and one of her books was on the bargain table. WHOO HOO. Jackpot. I gathered up a few other goodies on sale (plus the original book I came for), whipped out the Amex and was on my way. So, what’s the big deal? Well, the other day, I get THIS email:

“Ok, cool!” I thought. At first. Then I thought about it. I bought that book in the STORE with my CREDIT CARD and they somehow knew who I was and how to contact me. EW. Anyone else kinda creeped out about this or is this the new, cool target-marketing method?

I was thinking the other day about the differences between my generation (think Breakfast Club, Parachute Pants and Members Only Jackets) and today’s kids and how vastly different our communication tendencies are. For instance, if I wanted to send out a message to most or all of my contacts, I’d either send an email or use LinkedIn. If a 15-year-old wants to do that, they’d probably send that message through a site like MySpace or Facebook. If I want to tell someone something quick and short, like “Oh my God Becky, look at her butt”, I might call them or send them a quick instant message. The 15-year-old would most likely text that message with their phone in blazing, I can’t be bothered writing whole words speed - “OMG bky c hr a**?”.

My point is, in ten years when these kids are in the work force, will they be using email the same way that we do today? I hear more and more about college classes communicating via wiki’s and we all know how popular Facebook is with the college crowd, so the idea that they will stop using social websites to communicate once they are out of college may not be a viable one.

The Internet is starting to absorb email as a form of communication. Prior to the past few years, peer-to-peer communication was not easily done through websites. Now its practically built in to every new website that’s created.

So I guess this is the question to the masses, what is the future of email?

My favorite subject line in a long time - sent from a client  - read “FYI… Outlook 2007 is shady.”

Well that’s to say the least. For those of you waiting in giddy anticipation for the privilege of working with Office 2007, let me spare you. At first I thought it was me. If I added up the time it took me to find all of the basic functions that were previously a right-click away … I shudder to consider the productivity lost. But one day I heard music to my ears - the grief stricken cry from a coworker “How the $@#% do you PRINT in Word?” In an effort to “simplify” things for everyone, Microsoft has undone years of routine clicking by reorganizing everything into handy “ribbons”, based on new categories that we must now all learn.

Included in this “simplification” are changes to Outlook 2007 designed to protect us all from the evils of Spam. All whining aside, the changes don’t seem to be too monumental to the way we should all be doing email now anyway.  You wouldn’t know this however, from all of the backlash this change has created.

Are you ready for the earth-shattering list? Find each below with my commentary on how it changes (or not) the way we approach email campaigns:

No support for background images (HTML or CSS).
No big loss here. Anyone concerned about getting email past Lotus Notes system has known about this one for a long time. You are better off sticking with colored table cells & regular images to achieve the same goal. If you feel you MUST use a background image, be certain it isn’t pivotal to your creative or message.

No support for forms.
Since most major email clients don’t support the use of Javascripting – and that’s how error checking on forms is handled – it’s generally recommended to skip using forms in email. This has traditionally been done as a spam filtration and security measure. It’s recommended that you link out to the form from the email.

No support for Flash, or other plug-ins.
This type of rich media and plug-ins are typically searched for, and blocked, by spam filtration tools. Additionally, if the end user does not have updated systems to support the plug-in, your message will be impacted.  If you want to use media like Flash or streaming video, its best to link to a landing page with a hosted version of the component.

No support for animated GIFs.
This one seems kind of silly. It’s hard to think of a security reason behind it quite frankly. The good thing is that using good design, there should be no limitation here.

No support for CSS floats.
CSS Floats are generally used for bigger scale efforts such as website design. The best use of styles for email is “inline” and in context of the actual HTML files being delivered. For a while now, major email programs have not supported external stylesheets. Experienced emarketers have known to avoid using them as there is a risk of your email rendering poorly.

No support for CSS positioning.
This issue is relative to the other CSS issue mentioned above.

No support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists.
Anyone using images for bullets was probably avoiding the tag already. Your best bet is to stick with tables and include images in a column next to each bulleted item to control how everything lines up. 

There is an Outlook 2007 Tool: HTML and CSS Validator that supposedly helps you identify problem areas in your code if you are so inclined.

So while Outlook 2007 might have a new set of restrictions, the good news is that as long as you are using an experienced agency to design your email, you are in no danger of being “shady”. And no, there is no reason to have Outlook 2007 users receive text versions of your emails. I get plenty of Spam and legitimate marketing email every day that comes through just fine. So relax, take a deep breath and find something else to worry about – like how your emails are rendering.