You’ve probably heard of Ning, the online platform that allows users to quickly create their own social networks.
Today, I stumbled across a screen capture that I took a few months ago when I opened a welcome email from a Ning community. An automated welcome message for my newly approved membership was no surprise, but the standout feature was a simple list of the top four activities I might like to do as a new user — ranging from adding content to making an announcement on Twitter. Each activity was paired with a link directly to that action.
I even think the subject line was smart — leading with “your” immediately connotes that the message relates to something relevant and personal to the user. And the text-only email was easy to read in my email client, Gmail, which doesn’t display images by default.
Click to Enlarge
Designing email campaigns, we often tend toward the most graphic, elaborate and eye-catching presentations possible. Simple examples like this likely have click-through rates to prove their place in the digital marketer’s toolkits.
The only thing I might do differently would be to provide a primary call-to-action with additional, secondary options — rather than positioning them all at the same level. What do you think about this email? Do you have examples of how simplicity trumps elaborate in email marketing?
PS. Free, ad-sponsored networks are no longer supported on Ning, so the Austin Usability Professionals Association can now be reached at http://www.austinupa.org/ or better yet on Facebook.
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So true, Will. In fact, you hit on a really interesting point — when everyone wants to promote something different, it’s the the opportunity cost of overwhelming the user that has to be calculated.
It’s a compelling example. Most sites present the initial steps in the product, but this is a method to get people right away. Don’t invite them into the site, hope they get there, and then tell them what they can do, just tell them now! Especially since you can’t even do the twitter thing inside ning.
Now the risk is the user clicks the first link and just forgets about the email. Maybe a smooth transition into the site, so the list is right there in the app as well. That way you don’t rely on the user to go back and forth from email to site, potentially getting pulled away on other email. Maybe ning does do a sort of smooth transition, I don’t know.
Simple interactions like this are good, but deceptively hard to create. Everyone wants to promote something in the email. There are probably about 15 tasks they started with for this list, but they had to harshly pare down to get here, to this list of 4. It’s something to remember, especially for those entering this field; the most effective communication is often the simplest, but the process to get there is not as easy as it seems.
Great point. I think simplicity ALWAYS trumps elaborate in email. Alas, poor Ning, great welcome emails but losing users anyway.