Nearly all direct marketing email campaigns can benefit from bringing in oft-overlooked user experience principles. See how it can be done.
Each time you send someone an email, you create a little user experience for them. Yet most companies don't involve their user experience teams in the creation of email marketing campaigns. What's more, email newsletters or sales messages are almost never usability tested. What's happening here?
Of course, for the most part, the success of an email campaign depends on the offer, the supporting content and the targeting of the messages. These things are not typically driven by usability concerns -- in most organizations, they are (appropriately) owned by people with a direct marketing background. And for the most part, the best way to optimize email campaigns over time is by paying close attention to performance metrics such as open rates, clickthrough rates and conversion rates -- not the kind of data you could get from running a usability study.
Usability still matters
It seems that email is essentially a direct marketing competency -- not something companies typically assign to their "user experience" group. Yet, I have almost never seen an email campaign that could not be improved by making it more sensitive to user experience principles. Many messages are still too wide to display comfortably in the recipient's chosen email client -- the kind of problem that may be invisible in tracking statistics but is easily discoverable with just three hours of usability testing. In other cases, key contents are essentially invisible or impossible to scan quickly. Worst of all, users are still receiving too many messages that are irrelevant to them.
The business case for user-centered email design
While it may seem too simple to be a big priority, the design of your emails definitely represents an opportunity to communicate with customers and prospects, and to become a smarter and more sensitive marketer. This is especially true for companies that run multiple or integrated campaigns, or those that send out various types of status or confirmation messages in the same time span.
In addition, many cherished metrics are no longer as reliable as they used to be. Open rate is now a rough measure, currently used only to confirm that a severe problem has not occurred, such as when all or most of your messages are blocked by spam filters. In the absence of perfect information, it makes sense to consider usability.
Making your newsletters and other email campaigns more usable will not only help you squeeze out better results across all the relevant metrics, it will also lead to other benefits, such as the degree to which people trust your brand and find it relevant.
Making email messages more usable
Here are some simple techniques and principles borrowed from the world of usability and experience design that you can apply to the creation of your email campaigns.