The art of the email
As part of my role with Monash University, I’ve been lucky enough to dip into the wild world of email marketing -- and found it’s an intersection of UX and traditional comms.
Despite what you’ve heard, people are still continuing to use email. In fact, the number of emails people send and receive is increasing and will continue to increase.
Workplace chat apps such as Slack and social messaging tools are having an impact, but they’re failing to make a dent on how many emails we get and interact with day-to-day.
What’s happening, instead, is that these communications are adding to our total communications load.
That may not be the greatest thing in the world for our sanity as people, and for communicators hoping to drive an action from an email, it represents an opportunity and a threat.
The threat is that your communication will be lost in a sea of noise, but the opportunity lies in what happens if you get it right.
If you’re able to design a communications experience which is seamless and allows the user to digest information easily, you’ll stand out from the pack (sadly).
I don’t prefer to be an expert, but having dipped my toes in the email marketing pool, I have some ideas around how to marry UX and comms to deliver a fantastic experience.
Context is Everything
Very rarely is an email just an email.
Instead, it’s just one point on a whole thread of communication experiences a user may be having with a particular company.
For example, your email may be one part of the following experience chain:
A customer buys a product after receiving a slew of marketing comms promising the world if they’d just buy this one widget
They get an SMS about their order, and when to expect delivery
The order doesn’t show up, so they DM the company on social to see what’s up
They’re directed to a page which is running a chatbot to try and get answers
They don’t get answers from the chatbot, so they *gasp* call a customer service rep, and they’re pretty peeved
After chatting with the rep, they’re given a set of instructions on what to do next via email
They contact the delivery company, which finds that their order was lost in the mail
The customer begins a separate communications process with the delivery company
So while your email may just be one email, the journey to get that email began long before you’ve written a word.
You need to account for all that context before designing a comm.
There’s a world of difference of approach between ‘write a comm explaining delivery details’ and ‘write a comm explaining delivery details after the customer has interacted with the company five times already’.
This becomes especially important when taking user emotion into account.
It’s the tone of the thing
One of the really cool things I’m doing at the moment is designing an email which lets an applicant know that they’ve been offered a place at university.
Happy days!
The audience (particularly for international undergraduate applicants) may be people fresh out of High School, so they may very well print out the email and show their parents that they’re off to university.
It’s a damn fun email to write.
One of the emails I’m crafting is to let a user know they need to get a document into admissions. Less exciting.
One of the difficult emails I’m crafting at the moment is letting a student know that they’re on the verge of failing one of their units. Not a great email to write.
All these emails require user insight and deep understanding of not just where the user is in their overall communication journey (attached to the one outcome), but where they’re at emotionally.
The acceptance email requires all the marketing pizazz you can muster to enthuse the student.
The document reminder needs a focus on clear, almost bland, communication to leave the student in no doubt about what to do next.
The academic failure email requires the most delicate of touches and reassurance that the student is not alone.
It may sound obvious, but what a lot of tone of voice documentation doesn’t account for is the need to dial up or down depending on the context of the communication.
A UX writer or communicator can apply a tone of voice, a good UX writer or communicator knows when to trust their instincts.
The fold
It turns out that not a lot of people will read an email completely.
They won’t scroll down to the bottom of the email to read your perfectly crafted call-to-action.
Instead, what you need to make sure is that the essence of the message and the call to action is ‘above the fold’.
If you grab one of the rare broadsheet newspapers still around, you’ll find that more often than not it’s folded in two, because broadsheets are big and unwieldy.
So, journalists and sub-editors work hard on putting the juiciest stuff above the fold to inspire the reader (or user) to unfold the paper to find out more.
In much the same way, an email writer needs to make sure all the essential of juicy information is contained above the fold -- or above the point where a user needs to scroll down.
The Holy Grail is to make sure a reader can glimpse an email, get the essential information, and move on with their lives without needing to do anything beyond opening the email.
Knowing how to structure information is key.
Metrics v brand experience
Unfortunately, and we’ve all been there, communicators (particularly within larger organisations) can write to their KPIs rather than writing for people.
Unfortunately, it turns out that your perfectly crafted brand messaging may not immediately get people to open an email, and if KPIs are pegged to open rates then you’re going to have a bad time.
Or, rather, your users will.
Communicators know what levers to pull to get somebody to open an email, but most of the cards we can play are best left in the deck.
Take The Motley Fool, for example.
The Motley Fool is a company which essentially sells stock picks using high-volume sales tactics, and one of their key tools is to spam the ever-loving Jeebus out of people until they convert.
They keep on doing this because, well, it works.
But I’m unlikely to think of Motley Fool as a brand which can actually give me great advice -- after all, why do they need the sales tactics if the advice they’re offering is good in the first place?
Do they need to constantly re-fill the funnel because previous customers are leaving?
It turns out there’s a world of difference between delivering effective comms when the success metric is pegged to an open rate, and delivering effective comms when the success metric is pegged to customer satisfaction.
It is the Year of our Lord 2019, but a lot of people still haven’t figured this out.
But this is just one man rambling. What do you think makes up an effective approach to email communication?