Mark writes...
Email newsletters are a great way to stay in contact with your users and audience, but the experiences most people have are usually hit or miss. Having been recently bombarded by emails I've subscribed to over the years, I decided it was time to unsubscribe from a few to help clear my inbox. Boy did that suck!
How It Went Down
I needed to get rid of some emails, so naturally I started looking for the unsubscribe links. Those were hard enough to find, but once I did, I was on my way. It was the next step that was so outrageous that I nearly flipped my lid: some companies take as long as 10 days to process your request to unsubscribe.
Here's a look at some of the unsubscribe notifications I received:
Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble lacks personality—it feels cold and doesn't take care of me. Who's markd.otto@gmail.com? Use some emotion and appeal to me with just "you."
Best Buy
"Until the request has been processed, you may still receive promotional email messages." How weak is that? Best Buy, and others, knowingly uses this window to their advantage: they can cram emails down your throat for the next 10 days and you can't do anything about it. It's unfair and criminal, at best.
eBay
Holy moly! That's a lot to read, and I don't even know where to start. eBay still takes 10 days to unsubscribe, but the biggest loss on this page is in the copy and messaging. Ice cold, baby.
What People Want
So how is this even possible? The only reason I can think of is that these people have 10s if not 100s of thousands of sign ups for their newsletter campaigns, and they need to do things in batches. Whatever the reason, nobody is going to care. I don't care, you don't care, and your Average Joe doesn't care.
People want instant gratification. We want what we want, and we want it now. We need it now. For email newsletters, an immediate unsubscribe is the best way to give people just that.
What you have to realize is that by making the unsubscribe process difficult, you're leaving a bad taste in your customers' mouths. They are already at odds about leaving you for whatever reason, so don't make it that much harder on them. Let customers go with a smile on their face, or least keep the frown off it by making things easier.
So Who's Nailed It?
The team over at Campaign Monitor have nailed the email campaign experience, from start to finish. We use Campaign Monitor every month for our own ZURBnews, and recommend it regularly to our clients.
Here's a look at the success page for Campaign Monitor's unsubscribe feature:
It provides instant gratification, is friendly and easy to look at, and accounts for errors by offering users the immediate ability to sign up again. It fits with the start up mentality, a core audience for Campaign Monitor, and is a sure hit for us at ZURB.
Have any email or newsletter horrors to tell? Let them be heard in the comments!
Mark writes...
Motivating yourself when you're freelancing can be hard at times, but it comes much easier when working in a team environment. Within a team, you know you that a little competition never hurt anyone and is generally just good for the team. It perks people's attention and gets them fired up to do better the next time around.
With the ZURBlog, we needed to step up our blogging efforts and decided to make it one of our goals—and you may notice that it's paying off. Heck, extending my lead over Bryan, who's in second place, is what prompted me to write a post today in the first place.
So how does the ZURB team stay motivated to blog? A friendly race between teammates: The ZURBlog Cup Race.
A screenshot of the ZURB Dashboard's Blog Cup Race in action. It doesn't matter who's winning because it's the ZURB team that benefits.
OK, so we're not actually racing, but the effect is the same. We decided to engineer a points-based system for ourselves with blog posts, comments, and views, each worth a certain amount of points. Those points add up to the scores you see above and keep us moving right along. When one team member starts getting up there, the response has been to step up your game and get in there.
Motivating ourselves through a race between the team has worked well, and is benefiting ZURB—our chief goal that we accomplish through the race. Our Dashboard is where we focus our attention around all things ZURB. Every day we open up our Dashboard and check out what happened yesterday or overnight. It's a wonderful way to stay on top of things and keep our team motivated.
For motivation at ZURB, it's always a race with our team, but the fact is we're still a team racing to a finish line that's always moving forward. We may never reach it, but that just keeps us going and going and going...
Mark writes...
How many times have you wanted to use a website, only to be asked to fill out an overwhelming and overcomplicated form before even getting in the door? We've all been there, and it sucks. If you're business has one of these sites, chances are you're missing a lot of opportunity to create, amoung other things, new and avid members.
One site that seems to do it right is Kayak, a one-stop travel service that lets you search and book flights from dozens of airlines and other sites. It's a great tool, a joy to use really, and here's why: they make my life easier, but not just in their service offering. Kayak found the soft spot in me recently: dead simple Web forms.
Here's what I mean:
I've been using Kayak for awhile now, but never ran into this until just last week. I had just done my second search in one visit, looking for a round-trip flight from San Jose, CA (SJC) to Milwaukee, WI (MKE). Having just arrived at my search results, this popup appeared. I could have just closed it and went on my way, but a few of things called out to me:
- The title: "Become a Kayak Member. It's FREE."
- A set of 1-2-3 features crafted to my current experience with the site
- Only three form fields to register
- A conversational tone that appealed to the Internet savant in me
While not the most glorious visual design, the fundamentals of this registration popup are sound as steel. The message is that Kayak wants to help me make my life easier, beyond just providing me with a one-stop travel service. They're looking to improve the experience I have on their site, not just with travel in general.
The 1-2-3 tells me they're not messing around—they have 3 great reasons for me to sign up, all centered around my searching experience. At this point, they crafted a unique registration form for me based on what I've done on their site. Now the follow through is on my end, and as I looked at those three simple forms, I was dedicated to the end. The best part, perhaps a fourth selling point, was that they've been paying attention: I fly out of San Jose a lot.
Kayak walks a fine line here, but really pulls it off. By watching which departing airport I search for most often, they've helped me kickstart my registration. All I had to do was give my email address and a password.
The conversational tone they used helped nudge me along, too. "Home Airport" and "Finish" are much better phrases than "Departing City" or "Register." They spark emotion and a feeling of completeness, something that will subtly help users glide through registering.
Take a lesson from Kayak: make it as easy as possible for new members to get in the door. Captchas, spam protection, and numerous security questions should be antiquated in favor of downright intuitiveness and ease-of-use.
How are you helping new members sign up and using your service?
Mark writes...
If you're a designer, you're familiar with the concept of "selling your design." We go through the same process much of the time, pitching new or radical ideas to clients as we present our work. Along the way we've picked up on something big: you need to wow 'em.
But who's them? Your clients, your peers, your boss, and your girlfriend. OK, so maybe not your girlfriend, but definitely the others. Also, don't forget that you need to be excited. Excitement is contagious and if you haven't got the itch, you've got nothing to give. To get people jazzed about what you're doing, you need to be jazzed as well. To do that, you need something to wow people with.
Pitching a design can be as complex or simple as you make it, but it doesn't mean squat unless you've wowed your audience. In the early design phases—in our three step phase, those are the Define and Frame phases—it's easy to forget that. Don't. Great wow factors can be as simple as adding a cool new feature or taking a visual design to the next step.
Here's a tip: if you're coming up short on Wows, brainstorm at a whiteboard with someone for 10 minutes on "next steps." To make your brainstorm more interesting, ask yourself what you would like to see in the project. Whatever it is, just remember that your audience needs to be excited about what you're doing for any successful pitch.
It's the wow factor that seals the deal for every project that we've been involved in. Next time you're pitching a new design or idea, make sure you take it to the next step with a few "Wows." Find out how to get everyone involved excited and then carry that excitement through to the very end. Trust us, it'll pay off in the long run.
We draw things a lot. This isn't shocking--we're a design firm, right? And designers are virtuosos who create pretty pictures and gorgeous web designs.--isn't that the case? We think different.
Why does ZURB sketch? Really, we can't help ourselves. We're visual thinkers so we break problems down by asking lots of questions and build solutions up by experimenting with lots of solutions. Most get discarded quickly. Some survive to see another day. This is our design process at work. We use quick and cost-effective methods like sketching to solve big problems.
Sketching is a great low cost tactic for generating ideas, making decisions and driving things forward inside any business. Some of its benefits include:
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Helps identify problems. Don't like what you see, how it reads or the interaction between a few pages or elements? Print them out, add notes and share them with your team. You'll be surprised by how little time and documentation it takes to identify problems and start seizing opportunities like this.
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Quickly generates lots of ideas. You don't need high tech tools or lots of time, just pen and paper to rough out lots of solutions. It's actually hard to get too detailed if you keep it lo-fi and that's a good thing early in the design process. Get all those "what if..." possibilities out in the open.
- Makes it easy to filter out ideas you don't want. Early stage ideas can be tough to grasp when they're trapped in conversation. Quick sketching helps you to try them out a bit and then filter and edit down before taking anything too far into implementation. Leads to a lot of, "Oh, that won't work, what about this" moments.
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Anybody can join in. Some of the best ideas we've seen start with somebody saying, "Don't make fun of me, I don't know how to draw." Sketching isn't about making pretty pictures, it's about explaining an idea so that other people can get it. It can get team members from any discipline within your company to participate.
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Invites critique. Sketching is loose and messy and implies, "These are ideas we're trying out, but haven't been decided on yet." They're visual and so lo-fi that most people can feel comfortable contributing to them. There's less ego when there's less polish.
- Makes it easy to rework and refine the ideas you want. Since sketches don't take long to produce, they're extremely easy to reproduce. Through this process we can quickly refine on our ideas.
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Helps tell stories. Words can only get you so far to convey an idea. Being comfortable sketching in front of other people is a powerful storytelling skill. It's particularly vital to interaction design because it can shed preconceptions and tie ideal user experiences together.
Sketching doesn't just mean putting pen to paper. It's a shift in thinking that gets you to be scrappy with your materials and nimble with your thinking. Rather than settling in to enjoy creating a masterpiece, your goal is to engage yourself and your team in energetic storytelling that solves problems for people. Sketching is at the heart of design thinking.
By getting lots of ideas on the table, getting teams to filter and then collaborate to refine them, ZURB is able to help companies quickly find the most worthwhile opportunities to build. This avoids costly implementation of unproven ideas and drives innovation in our clients' business.
