Mailing lists
Anyone putting a Web site together for whatever reason is going to want to publicise it to a greater or lesser extent. One technique being used a lot at the moment is the mailing list. You’ll have seen numerous examples of this, I’m sure — in fact, if you look to the left of this page you will find this site’s mailing list sign-up form.
Not any more — Microsoft’s killing of ListBot killed the list and I haven’t yet set up a replacement. Anyone wanting to be e-mailed about site updates should e-mail me.
My main aim with it was to keep some of my regular visitors informed about site upgrades, but there is no doubt that mailing lists have a publicity function too. Whether or not it is good publicity depends on how it is implemented.
“Hang on,” you might be saying, “just how is a mailing list publicity? Someone has to visit your site to sign up for your mailing list, so they already know about it, don’t they?”
Well, there’s more to publicity than getting people to visit your site once — you want them to come back. People don’t often spend much, if anything, on their first visit to a site (unless they have sought it out with the specific intention of doing so). Casual visitors, who may have followed an interesting link or typed in a URL from a magazine almost never do. On the other hand, repeat visitors — people who spend more time on the site because they are interested in it and who come back several times — are much more likely to do business there. (I’m talking about doing business, but you can think about this in the broadest terms: for some sites, “doing business” will mean reading the content or looking at the pictures — whatever the raison d’être of the site is.)
Mailing lists, along with (of course) regular updates to the site’s content, help to keep people coming back to your site. Even if they don’t come back every time they get a list message, it keeps them aware of your site, your business and your product. Of course, you have got to get it right, so here are seven things to bear in mind…
- Don’t fill up mailboxes. People get e-mails from their bosses, their partners, their colleagues, their clients, their friends — and then, of course, there is the stuff which comes from mailing lists, plus, unfortunately, some outright spam. Anything you send to them via a mailing list is going to be very far down the list of priorities. The more messages you send via the mailing list, the more it will be perceived as a nuisance, so you have got to send it frequently enough to maintain awareness of your site but not so frequently the recipients curse with each new message’s arrival. More than weekly is rarely justifiable, less than monthly is courting the risk of your potential clients forgetting what the mailing list is and why they signed up for it.
- Keep it short. As I said, people get a lot of e-mail; also, e-mails are not particularly easy to read because of the minimal formating — so the longer your message, the less likely they are to read it. A short paragraph (five lines or so) with the message you want to get over is enough. Anything more should be confined to headings with links to the relevant part of your site (getting them to visit the site again is the point, remember) and no more than a short sentence of description per link.
- Don’t trick people into signing up. The basic approach of most sites to mailing lists is that visitors have to sign up to the list: it is an opt-in system. So if you want to join this site’s mailing list, you have to enter your e-mail address and hit the JOIN LIST button. This approach is not perfect, but is probably the best available. Unfortunately, there are sites which use different approaches to trick users into joining the list. Does it matter if users get added to your mailing list without wanting to? Put it another way: does it matter if users get thoroughly pissed off with your site before they have ever bought anything from you, if users come away feeling they can’t trust you and that you have all the integrity of the worst sort of kitchen salesman? What do you think? Two bad techniques which are, unfortunately, often used are:
- Using a checkbox in an order form which defaults to the checked state. Now this is still in theory an opt-in technique, since the checkbox is labelled “I want to join your mailing list” or something like that. However, users are well known to be bad at reading instructions on the Net (why should it be different from anywhere else?), and having the default state checked means that a lot will join the list without intending to. If you want to use the checkbox approach, make the default state unchecked.
- An even worse approach is to use a checkbox with (in small type) the information that ticking this box means you do not want to join — if it is unchecked, you’re in the list! This is not the way users expect the checkbox to work, and many users will be conned into joining the list. (I have been told that this was a technique used at boo.com. Frankly, I’m amazed anyone stuck around long enough to find out, but it is interesting that the bad design of the site extended even to this.)
- Don’t stop them leaving. Even with an opt-in technique, some people are going to sign up without meaning to (it seemed a good idea at the time…) — or even accidentally sign up someone else. A lot of e-mail addresses are far from simple, and easily mistyped. If a mistyped address happens to be an existing address, someone is unexpectedly going to be receiving your list messages. It is crucial to provide an easy method of unsubscribing from the list — if it is bad tricking your site’s visitors into joining the list, it is much, much worse to add someone (however accidentally) who has never even heard of you, your site or your company to the list without giving them any means of leaving it. At the very least you should have an address at the foot of the message which the recipient can use to unsubscribe.
- Make the content interesting. It isn’t too hard to know what will be interesting: something which makes or saves money; something which is useful; something new. So: use your mailing list to inform users about special offers, to tell them about new or updated products or new information about products they may already have, and to let them know about updates and changes to your site. Again, keep it short — basically, headings only — and make sure it links back to the site.
- Don’t send HTML messages. It is becoming more and more common for corporate mailing lists to send out e-mails containing extensive HTML formatting, with many images (sometimes sent as attachments, sometimes hyperlinked from a remote server) and styled text. This parallels in many respects the way some sites depend entirely on Shockwave and make no provision for the user with a browser which does not support it: these complex messages may look good on the company’s Microsoft Outlook, but that does not mean they will look good on a user’s e-mail client (which may very well not be Outlook or Outlook Express). If you don’t know what I mean, take a look at this example, which arrived in a friend’s mailbox recently. The first shot — I’ve obscured the company name — is the e-mail as it should have looked, as far as I know (although note that an error in preparing the e-mail has left an unsightly line of code hanging at the top of the message):
![[Image: The way it should have looked]](../../images/examples/htmlmail2.jpeg)
The second, below, shows the actual appearance when it hit her mailbox. The message is readable, but unsightly. It does not look particularly professional, does it?
![[Image: The mess it actually was]](../../images/examples/htmlmail1.jpeg)
Sending an e-mail as plain text might not look as “sexy”, but it at least looks competent. Apart from the the cosmetic question, there are other reasons why this is bad. Any e-mail which incorporates images has to either have the images included in the e-mail or have links to the images on some remote server. That means that you are either forcing users to connect for longer than they otherwise have to to download your images, or possibly making (or attempting to make) them reconnect if they try to read the email offline. Either way, you are irritating them and you may be costing them money. It is even worse, of course, if they have not asked to be included on the list in the first place… - DON’T SPAM! Spamming is, if you happen not to have come across the term before, the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mails. What exactly is a “bulk e-mail” is a good question — I have heard it said that if you e-mail twenty or more people with one message that’s bulk. It seems a reasonable figure, but it is really the unsolicited part which matters. It might seem that sending out hundreds or thousands of e-mails saying “My business is JUST what you WANT!” is no different from giving out flyers or sending junk mail through the post. But it is. For one thing, if you hand out flyers or send junk mail, you are paying for it. If you spam, the recipient pays for it. Spam also occupies bandwith, which makes the Net more sluggish than it would otherwise be, and it is downloaded on to hard disks where it takes up space — even now, not everyone has gigabytes to play with. If you send out spam, however you get hold of people’s e-mail addresses, you have to realise that spammers are loathed by most Net users — almost everyone, in fact, apart from spammers. It is not a way to win friends and customers. If you forget every other point here, remember this one: only send mailing list messages to people who have said they want to receive them.
ADDENDUM:
Isn’t it interesting that, just two days after putting this together, one friend who read this came across news of a new technique which is so annoying, so stupid that the possibility of it had never even occurred to me. eBay’s users have to register, of course; it isn’t too surprising that when they do so they have the option to receive marketing e-mails from eBay — or not to receive them.
What eBay has decided is that the decision by many of its users not to receive these messages is a “problem”, and it is going to rectify the problem. eBay users whose notification preference settings are “no” rather than “yes” are having their settings returned to the default “yes” to put them “in line with the rest of the eBay community”. eBay treats the decision of these users not to receive the messages as an “error … during your registration process”.
Having a system where the default is to be put on a mailing list is bad, as I have already stated, but however the system is structured when a user chooses not to receive messages accept it! It is easy to think quite sincerely when you are running a business that your customers would benefit from getting your mailings, that there are plenty of products and offers they would like if they knew about them. Easy, but wrong: many people are absolutely not interested.
If you bombard them with mail they don’t want, especially if they have specifically said that they don’t want it, you are antagonising people who have already demonstrated an interest in your product — potentially, you may drive away existing customers rather than attract new business. This is so stupid I suspect even G.W. could understand why it’s a bad idea.
© DC 2001. All rights reserved.
