In previous posts, I outlined a number of techniques you can use to make your website more persuasive. However, knowing the techniques is one thing; developing effective messaging is another.

For example, consider Matching Existing Knowledge. It's a powerful technique. But it can only work if you fully understand your target audience and know what their "existing knowledge" is!

Traditional User Testing is not likely to be much help here. These tests are typically task-based. Even if you have an opportunity to ask questions of participants, you won't have much time to probe deeply.

What about surveys or focus groups? Forget about it. Participants — even if they're aware of what their underlying motivations are — will rarely be able to express them clearly in such a setting.

And the personas (customer stand-ins) you've developed? Won't they have the answers? Probably not, as the personas developed in typical user-centered design processes are not nearly detailed enough when it comes to issues of emotion, deep motivation and underlying fears.

Yes, the above techniques might give you a few insights. But they will never give you a deep understanding of your customers.

The only way to get that is through in-depth, one-on-one interviews. Below are a few guidelines to conducting effective interviews:

Recruit Subjects From Your Actual Target Group

In traditional user testing, we sometimes say "any test is better than no test". And if we don't have a subject available who exactly matches our target user, we'll test on someone who's "close enough". Usability problems, where they exist, will probably be revealed anyway.

Unfortunately, this "close enough" approach does not work when it comes to persuasion. You're looking for the nitty gritty of what makes your customers tick, and only your actual target group can tell you that.

Interview Lots of Subjects

Again, the process needed for persuasive web design is more demanding. In traditional User Testing, you're looking for errors, sources of confusion, etc. A relative handful of subjects (say 5 - 10) will identify all the major ones.

With Persuasive Web Design, you're looking for patterns. You're looking for insights you can generalize to a wider population of users. And these insights are harder to find. So you need to interview more subjects. Probably around 20.

Make the Subjects Feel Comfortable

You need to uncover deeply personal information, things the subject probably isn't even aware of. This is not going to happen unless the subject is comfortable and trusts you. A few helpful things to do are:

• Dress casually
• Hold the interview in a quiet, comfortable room with subdued lighting
• Establish rapport with a few easy-to-answer questions
• Don't make too much eye contact (it's hard for subjects to be introspective when someone's looking them in the eye)
• Look and act relaxed (slouching is good!)
• Don't be judgmental

Focus on Scenarios, Zero in on Feelings and Beliefs

The interviews should focus around scenarios (for example, "applying for a loan online"). But you don't actually ask the subject to perform the task. Rather, you ask how he'd go about the task and — most importantly — what he believes and how he feels at each stage of the process.

Probe Deeper!

Don't be in rush to get through the entire scenario. Probe for more detail, because that's were the useful nuggets of information will lie. You should find yourself asking things like:

• "Okay... Tell me more about that."
• "Mmm hmm.... What else?"
• "So you're saying...?"
• "Oh I see. And why is that?"
• "And how does that make you feel?"

A properly-conducted interview can uncover a mountain of useful information. Deep information about how your customers think and what motivates them. Next week, I'll discuss how to analyze this information and put it to use.

With recent talk of "real time indexing" in Google,  we've noticed a lot  of people asking "why is it taking so long for Google to index my site?" Truthfully, there are a million factors to consider, each totally independent of the others. However, for this post I am going to list three fairly common ones that you might just want to take a look at.

Solving site structure

Deep pages can be a huge problem for some sites. Blogs in particular which might have an insane directory structure such as blog.com/justin/seo/2010/03/13/why-im-not-getting-indexed.html can create trouble for unwary webmasters, with such issues as:

Poor page rank

Driving through multiple pages to reach each level of the directory structure can reduce page rank to a trickle. Think of it like a champaign tower, each glass sending a little more down the way. Of course in this case, each page actually sends 0.85x(linking pages page rank)/(# of links on a linking page). Pages with poorer page rank are deemed "less relevent" and thus indexed less frequently.

Broken site structure

With lots of inlinking its easy to let links to internal content drop down your site structure, or even worse: break entirely. This can make it impossible to index inner content.

Duplicate content

Recently a lot of wordpress blogs have found themselves having to wait 7 days before new posts get indexed. Why 7 days? The affected sites had their front page in Google, just subpages were taking some time. 

Google (and most search engines) still have trouble with duplicate content. Seeing the same content on the front page as in a sub page it is possible that it was ignoring sub pages, believing them to be duplicate content.

Further, a lot of these sites were scraper sites, with little of their own content. Google has been cracking down on there. Hard. In amidst a bunch of restrictions on scraper sites it is also quite possible that Google would be punishing blogs that had similar key indicators, whether or not they were scrapers.

What are the key indicators? Only Google would know.

Cloaking

Google doesn't like when you cloak your pages. What is cloaking? That's when you read the user agent string of an incoming visitor and give different content to them. 

This isn't always a bad thing, in fact Youtube does it, but suffice to say Google cautions people to be very wary of cloaking (see Matt Cutts in the comments).  

How could I be cloaking if I don't mean to be?

Large organizations tend to have a lot of cooks in the kitchen, so to say. While one team might be responsible for development, another might be behind design, and another marketing. In fact, we once found that a client of ours was cloaking the content going to Google without even realizing it. Needless to say it was a forehead smacking moments when realized what was going on.

What you can do:

Rethink your site architecture: It might be time to think about how your site handles it's masses of pages. While it is true that more pages give you more page rank to play with, without the use of nofollow to modify your inner site structure, you may be better off rethinking the way your pages interlink.

Get more links pointing at your inner pages: Sending more linkjuice to the pages you want indexed is always a good idea. It also helps with their page rank, and overall site ranking.

Try using blog snippets: Snippets on the main page with longer articles on subsequent pages can help with your content issues. 

Use the canonical tag: It lets you determine original content for a page. Not that useful when your problem is front versus inner page on blog posts, but it won't hurt.

Browse your pages with SEO browser:  SEO browser queries the URL you feed it with whatever user agent string you select, then lets you see it as the bots do: text only. Useful if you're thinking there might be something fishy going on. 

Of course this will only detect user agent cloaking. For IP based cloaking you would need to compare it to the Google cached version.

Everyone is talking Google's officially released SEO Report Cards, so - as usual - we're not. Instead this week we have how to work with multi-regional websites, syncing Google Apps with Microsoft Office, and getting started with conversion testing.

• We start the week with Google's webmaster central blog, on working with multi-regional websites. This is one rich post, with advice on choosing TLD's, geotargeting, URL structure, and more. A must read for anyone working with international websites.
• From Six Revisions, how to promote your work through collaboration. Some very good ideas in here.

• Google has opened up the Apps Script Gallery, so you can all share your Google Apps scripts. 

• Avinash is back with more on determining appropriate KPI's. This time it's the "Three Layers of So What" test, and how you can use it to make sure your data is actionable.
  
  

• Six Revisions has a wonderful quick guide to getting started with conversion testing,  beginning with understanding analytics data, and moving on through user testing.
• Looks like I am not alone in complaining about EasyJets user experience. Good Usability has a fun post on designing web forms which addresses how EasyJet makes some subtle but crucial mistakes.

• Oh my god, they've done it. They've bloody done it. The mad geniuses at Offisync have created a means to integrate Microsoft office and Google Docs. This will, they claim, allow you to write a doc in Microsoft Word and when you save it, have it sync with a Google Doc. 
• The Harvard Business Review has some tips to being a good public speaker. Of note, listen to your audience. Ignoring them and just talking leads to unengaging presentations that do little more than help people catch up on their sleep.

When someone shows their trust in us, we tend to trust them in return. This neat psychological truism has been (mis)applied by con artists for generations... and can work equally well on your website.

Just to demonstrate how it works, let's first consider the dark side: how you might — if you were a con artist — use this technique to steal a camera while on a tropical holiday. Eight easy steps:

1. Bring your own camera to the beach on a nice hot day.
2. Look for your target: a sunbather whose camera you'd like to steal.
3. Position yourself near your target, sunbathe for a while.
4. When the moment feels right, approach the target and ask if he wouldn't mind holding onto your camera while you go for a swim.
5. Go for a swim.
6. Return from swim, retrieve camera from target and thank him politely.
7. Go back to your towel and resume your sun bath.

That's really all you have to do. The target will take care of the rest. Because at some point, he's probably going to want to go for a swim.

And what do you think he's going to do with his camera before going for his swim? He's going to ask someone to watch it for him. Someone he trusts.

And whom does he trust? You: the polite person who just demonstrated trust by asking him to watch your camera. Diabolical isn't it?

The final step is the best and easiest: Enjoy the smug, slightly sinister satisfaction of knowing you could leave with the target's camera if you really wanted to. (Hey, you're not actually a camera thief, are you? If so, please erase steps 1 through 7 from your memory.)

What's this got to do with Persuasive Web Design??

You can use this same principle to make your website appear more trustworthy. Simply demonstrate that you trust your visitors. "Free trials", where appropriate, are one way. But the simplest and most effective application is often in your return policy.

Restrictive return policies — including short time limits and nasty restocking fees — are a real turn-off. They demonstrate that you don't trust your customers... making you look less trustworthy, even downright sneaky.

Generous return policies, on the other hand, make you look like a star. Consider the return policy at the men's pant store, www.bonobos.com:

Any pant, any time, any reason. We'll pay for standard shipping both ways.

Wow. In theory, I could buy a pair of pants, then return them five years later — after I've gained 20 pounds and they no longer fit. And occasionally, someone will do just that. But the vast majority of people won't.

The folks at Bonobos are clever enough to realize that by allowing the occasional customer to take advantage of their generosity, they are making themselves appear much more trustworthy to all shoppers. (Plus, they're showing confidence in their products' quality.)

Of course, not all businesses can afford to implement quite so generous a return policy. But think twice before getting too restrictive. Do some arithmetic. Ask yourself if it's worth alienating the majority of shoppers, just to protect yourself from the occasional dishonest one.

Personalization can do a lot to help an email campaign. Split tests regularly show that personalization options hugely increase email conversion rates. However, lately I've been wondering about how we can use group targeting instead of personalization as a way to engage readership. Specifically, I've been wondering if, perhaps, we could further engage email audiences by adding them to targeted groups, and then addressing the groups directly, instead of the individuals. The reasoning has to do with how individuals interact in groups, specifically how groups provide identity, support, and guidance for their members. Would grouping people together engage them readily with the subject?

Personalization without the individual

What brought this question up was a study by Henri Tajfel titled Social categorization and intergroup behavior (1971). In this study researchers took a group of boys and divided them into groups, then asked them to distribute a resource between the members of both groups.

Tajfel hypothesized that people would form ingroups and outgroups innately, without even the need for face to face contact between members, or even any value to the formation of the group. To test this he tried a series of experiments.

In the first experiment they asked the boys to estimate a number of dots, then split into two groups. One group was told that they were split by the highest and lowest scores. The other was told that they were divided by the most and least accurate. In truth, they were randomly selected.

The boys were then told that they would be assigning monetary rewards to the others, though never to themselves. They wouldn't know who the other children were, only their scores and what group they belonged to. 

The result of the test was that, predictably, the boys favoured their own group over others, distributing more money to those in their group. The  better part was that the results held true as they made the examples ever more minimal, reducing what the boys served to gain from favouring their own group. It made no difference. no matter whether they had anything to gain from it they favoured their own.

Tajfel et al. repeated the test, further isolating the effects of the ingroup. Again, members rewarded those who were part of their own group. Tajgel concluded that:

The main findings in all three experiments is clear; in a situation devoid of the usual trappings of ingroup membership and of all the vagaries of interacting with an outgroup, the [subjects] still act in terms of their ingroup membership and of an intergroup categorization. Their actions are unambiguously directed at favouring the members of their ingroup against the members of the outgroup.

This test has been repeated with successively more minimal systems, and continued to show that we do engage in ingrouping readily. The reason for this, as Tajfel would come to argue, is that we construct our identities around the groups we belong to. 

Applying this to email marketing, appealing to a group may be more engaging than to an individual. By maintaining a structured group that you deal with as a set, with a clearly defined separation from other groups, perhaps we could create a more engaging experience by interconnecting the end user experience with individual user identity at a subjective level? I think this may happen more frequently than we think. Take, for instance,  web forums where different sub-forums create ingrouping based on interest, producing rivalries and other group to group activities, which in turn increase the self identification of a user with their community.  

The difference here is, of course, that forums allow peer to peer and multi-directional communication while email tends to be pretty explicitly one way. Could we apply this same affect without the P2P communication though? I don't know.

Stuff to try:

1. Segmenting by interest (definition of group)

2. Including contribution from "the group". (Identification of group)

3. Giving each group information about other groups, and what they're doing (distinction of groups)

4. Selectively including group content (moderation of group/user interaction?)

What a week for news. There was more than I could include on almost every subject--even analytics! Paring it down to just a few, we have: newbie twitter mistakes, coding with lesscss, setting up GA goals, and the logic of good and bad usability.

• We start the week with Social Media Today's list of newbie twitter mistakes. I'm happy to say that I only made (am making?) one of these. Of course, that one is #1. I've all but given up on my twitter account.
• Next up Mailchimp thinks that the whole pr profession really needs to get a grip. The problem, they say, is that PR tends to use non-permission based mass email campaigns, which hurt both their reputation and breaks the law. Being the constructive criticisers that they are they suggest a few ways for PR to do what they do without getting on ESPs, and users bad sides.

• Adam V. pointed this my way a few days ago. This is a ruby based (and soon java based) CSS environment that uses variables, nested rules, and a whole host of other awesomeness to provide a manageable CSS environment that lets you do complex operations with CSS.
• Nettuts has a quicktip on the HTML 5 audio element, covering how to use it. It's currently not that useful to be honest, given its limitations, but neat none the less.

• A couple from the Google Analytics blog that I had never noticed: First setting up goals in GA, which is pretty self explanatory.
• Second, and more advanced, structuring your account with roll up reporting.

• In Human Factors International's last newsletter they discuss the logic of good and bad design, covering how business politic can get in the way of usability. Of course the problems they cite that hold back usability professionals seems to me to be the problem facing nearly every job.
• It's a truism: red buttons increase conversions. Well, really contrast increases conversions and nothing contrasts like a red button. Usability Counts cites a Which Test Won case where the red buttons didn't win, though in their case the red button DID win, it's just that when you surround a red button by red buttons it kinda loses its... charm.

• You know those square bar codes you see everywhere? Those are QR codes. While browsing about I found a site that lets you build QR codes. Very cool.
• Lifehacker has a post on using paper rater to criticize your writing style. Not sure how fond I am of the criticism it gives (its grammar suggestions were often inaccurate) but it does give some neat stats on your writing and... well, criticism is always useful.

One of the funny things about working in web usability is that you become very sensitive to how unusable many things are (i.e. physical things, not just web sites). Long ago, I wrote about my experience with a microwave oven. Today I'd like to mention another of my pet usability peeves: the "One Touch" Control on my Holmes window fan.

Fan controls should be really simple, right? Just three buttons: off, low and high. Or one toggle switch that cycles between off, low and high.

No, no... that would be too obvious and wouldn't give the manufacturer bragging rights about exciting features!

So the engineers at Holmes decided to throw a thermostat into the mix. (Why I don't know; it's a FAN, not an air conditioner.) Much worse, they decided to have all functions (on/off, high/low, plus 5 temperature settings) controlled by a single push button. Apparently the engineers/designers were very proud of themselves, as they boast about this "feature" with a "1-Touch" sign below the button.

It's the most unusable system imaginable. Toggling through off/high/low with a single button would have been okay. (You'd never be more than two button presses from where you want to be.) But because they combined the thermostat control into the same button, the user is forced to toggle through all the thermostat settings... even if he doesn't want to use the thermostat!

The two speed settings are multiplied by five, giving ten different settings. Plus "off", making eleven. So it's not "one touch" at all. It's more like eleven touch. (The movie This is Spinal Tap comes to mind: "My fan goes to eleven!"*)

To be fair, the engineers did add an alternate way to turn the fan off. You can just hold the button down. But since you have to hold it down for about a WEEK, the less patient of us would rather toggle. Then of course we get frustrated and start pressing too fast... and we pass the setting we wanted... and since there's no going backwards, we have to start all over again... meaning it's 22 touches... oops missed it again... now 33 touches... Grrrrr.

So what can we learn from this usability travesty? At least two things.

First, think twice about adding unnecessary features (like a thermostat in a fan). And second, think eleven times before combining two different feature controls into a single button.

Anyone want to buy a slightly used fan?

* For those too young to understand the reference:

Due to popular demand, we've added additional days to our March Internet Marketing Essentials seminars. We've now got openings on March 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th!

For those not in the know, Internet Marketing Essentials is a seminar series taking attendees through the four key components of Internet Marketing: designing persuasion, attracting visitors through SEO & PPC, and understanding & Optimizing your visitors with Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer.

If you want to learn the tools to build an online empire then… signup at the bottom of the page.

More about Internet Marketing Essentials

Part 1 - The Art and Science of Persuasive Web Design

Instructor: Michael Straker

Dates:  March 4th  April 7th

Time: 9:00am–5:00pm

Price: $375

Description: 

This is a one day training course on the principle of persuasive web communication. The principles of persuasive communication stem from research within the social sciences, and while these techniques may not always be intuitive, they have been proven to successfully build trust within web users, and ultimately persuade them to take action.

A student of this one day course will learn the principles of persuasive communication. This is achieved through explanation of the theory, through the review of relevant case studies and through performing exercises. Once fully grasped, these principles will enable a student of this course to use some clever techniques to turn their web visitors into customers!

Part 2 - Search Engine Optimization

Instructors: Alex Tomin, Ken Moss

Dates: March 11th,  April 14th

Time: 9:00am–5:00pm

Price: $375

Description: 

Maximize your website's visibility in natural search.

It's a necessity in today's world for your company's website to be visible for the keywords and phrases they're targeting. In our one-day training course, we go over in great detail what factors search engines look at when deciding relevance of a website and determining rankings within natural search. We will look at, and give examples of, how web businesses can improve both their on-page and off-page SEO efforts to boost visibility and increase revenue.

A student of this course will learn what elements of a website are important factors that search engines look at to determine relevance and where efforts should be focused for both on-page and off-page SEO.

Part 3 - Google Analytics & Google Website Optimizer Bootcamp

Instructor: Neal McGann, Brian Katz, Andre Wei

Dates:  March 18th,  April 21st

Time: 9:00am–5:00pm

Price: $375

Description: 

A student of this one day course will get a solid foundation for understanding Google Analytics and learn best practices relating to landing page optimization, experiment design and the use of GWO - Everything required to run their own successful conversion optimization program.

This one day training session is split into two sessions:

Morning:	An introduction to understanding Google Analytics Visitor Tracking and Reporting. This session will cover the core concepts of Web Analytics, how to read the reports in Google Analytics and the action that can be taken with the insights found in the reports.
Afternoon:	Learn the principles and strategies required to run a successful Google Website Optimizer program. This session will cover the fundamentals of test theory, page selection, hypothesis creation, page optimization, experiment design, and the use of Google's free testing tool, Google Website Optimizer, to conduct experiments.

Part 4 - Pay Per Click Marketing

Instructors: Alex Tomin, Ken Moss

Dates: Choose from March 25th,  April 28th

Time: 9:00am–5:00pm

Price: $375

Description: Get the most out of your Google Adwords campaigns.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing is one of the most effective advertising models you can use to reach your targeted audience. Knowing how to effectively manage this solution will increase visibility for your businesses and produce a good return on investment. Our indepth one day course will focus on using the most popular PPC vendor - Google AdWords. We will cover the major aspects of managing a successful PPC campaign from initial setup to ongoing management.

A student of this course will learn how to use Google Adwords effectively to promote their businesses products and services.

Cool stuff this last week, even ignoring all the olympic bacchanalia. We've got CSS typography, installing GA on your Facebook fanpage, and madlib style signup forms.

• We are always going on about it, but the SEO blog world seems ot largely ignore it (it's just not "cool enough" for most of youse I guess): On page optimization, and the role it plays in making sure that websites rank properly. This week we're not alone: Don't Forget Onsite Optimization!
• As a promotion for their newest ebook, ClickEquations is running a series of their "secret truths" of PPC. this week was on Impression Share, where they advise that you read this older post. Why post the original then? Because they do make a good point:
  Because Impression Share is reported only at the campaign level, it is always an average. Looking at the number for campaigns that contain keywords and ad groups with highly disparate performance, clarity of target, match type distribution, and other characteristics makes it a worthless and probably misleading number. In order to trust Impression Share, your campaign organization must be focused and internally consistent

• Smashing had a great article last week on the future of css typography, covering a few billion ways to control text, some of which may or may not be cut when the CSS3 spec is finalized.
• Nettuts, on the other hand, is a little more image focused, with how to set up CSS3 transitions, aka. animations.

• The Google South East Asia blog (I didn't even know it existed) had a wonderful analytics oriented post last month on their favourite advanced segments. How I managed to miss this I have no idea, but here it is now. Some of these are great, like "Visits that dropped out of the funnel" "First-time buy visits" and "Return visit buys"
• Well THIS is cool. The clever cats over at webdigi.co.uk have scrounged together a way to insall GA tracking code on Facebook fan pages.

• Originallity gets you everywhere in this world. It got some pretty mean conversion rate increases for these guys who thought hey, wouldnt it be cool and original to contextualize a signup form? Yeah it's cool. Very very very cool.

• Every seen Microsoft photosynth? It's that cool tech that lets you browse through "layers" of user generated photos. Well Google has implemented something similar with user photo navigation in Google Streetview. It's pretty cool so far, though it needs to implement more photo sources to really flesh out cities. Copyright restrictions be damned!
• If you're anything like methen you use three google accounts a day. A personal one for my RSS feeds, a good apps account for docs, mail, and calendars, and then another work account for Google Analytics. Switching between the three of these is a pain in the ass, and involves a lot of logging in, or multiple browsers. Well, Lifehacker has a pretty awesome solution, using Firefox and multiple profile switcher. It's not the "switch cookies" plugin I'd like, but it is a pretty nice hack to keep you from having to login every time you want something new. Maybe we can work out a way to do this with Chrome and it's "each tab is its own process" setup so that you can have different profiles per tab.

Over the past couple of years, I've been shifting my focus from creating sites that are merely "usable" to creating sites that actually motivate visitors to take action. In other words, to persuasive web design. From "can do" to "will do".

A great primer in the field is Dr. Susan Weinschenk's book, "Neuro Web Design: What Makes them Click?" An absolutely fascinating read, the book opens with the concept that we actually have three brains:

• The "new brain" is the logical part, where we make conscious decisions
• The "mid brain" controls emotions
• The "old brain" deals with issues of basic survival and reproduction (Will it kill me? Can I eat it? Can I have sex with it??)

Usable and persuasive web sites engage all three brains. For example:

• To engage the "new brain", ensure you've covered all the logical reasons people should do business with you.
• To engage the "mid brain", use imagery and/or words that evoke an emotional response.
• To engage the "old brain", speak to issues of basic self: security, safety and (if appropriate) sex.

In subsequent chapters, Dr Weinschenk covers many specific persuasion techniques: social validation, scarcity, building commitment and much more.

If you're interested in persuasive web design, you should definitely read this book. And (warning: shameless plug coming) if you're anywhere near Vancouver, you should take my day-long "Online Persuasion" course too. We're holding a couple of sessions next week.

When was the last time you checked your website’s link profile? Are all your links pointed to the home page? If the answer is yes then you’ve got some work to do. We all know how important links are, but you need to spread the link love around to help out your internal pages. Strengthening the power of these pages will help get them the visibility that they need to start making you more money.

Building stronger internal pages starts with analyzing what you’re currently working with. You’ll first want to check out which pages are actually acquiring links (tools such as 'Link Diagnosis’ can help). If you see a trend of particular internal pages gaining links, then you should determine why and find out if this can be applied to any other pages. If none of your internal pages are receiving links, then its time to take a good hard look at the content and the steps needed to improve it.

Weak, generic or uncreative content won’t help you get the link juice that your site needs. If you’re website is full of page after page of average content, you’ll need to spend time beefing it up. You need the pages contained within your site to persuade people to want to use it as a reference. While this is always easier said then done, with a little time, effort and creativity it can be accomplished.

First you should review your competition to find out what they’re doing. This way you can make sure that you’re doing something different to stand out. If you can’t distinguish your site from the rest of the pack, there’s no reason for people to link to you instead of them.

Your next step is to update your pages so that you’re giving visitors compelling content. While not every product or service makes for exciting material, there are a few ideas which you may want to consider. These may include providing product reviews, case studies or a compiled list of valuable industry resources. Post in-depth interviews of industry professionals, opinionated articles or analysis on the latest industry news and technology. Provide your users with downloadable resources, interactive content or useful tools. Whatever product or service your site offers; in order to gain deep links your content needs provide value, demonstrate your authority on the subject and differentiate itself from pages on similar sites.

Over the last week a couple coworkers, clients and I have been discussing the effectiveness of email campaigns that we've received over the last few months. We've had arguments over whether or not headlines like "Why Is Your PC So Slow" and "Get $50 for 30 Minutes of Your Time" are effective at getting people to open emails. We've debated the usefulness of less-than-paragon tactics such as out-out's and disguised opt-ins (if you need an example of the latter go try to download Quicktime from Apple.com and tell me if you have to enter your email address in order to do so). We've settled on three general principals that we think creates a good, and effective, email campaign, including: trust & recognition, matching expectation, and affective quality of subject lines.

Trust & recognition

This is our primary factor. One of the keys to not being marked as spam is to gain the trust of the person you're sending to. If you've created an opt-in campaign then there's a good chance that the people you're sending to already trust you to an extent. However, you want to be sure that they recognize both that they did opt in to receiving emails from you, and that they are getting what they signed up for. Means of doing this include:

• Use coherent identifiers
  A Mailchimp study of 40 million emails sent through their service found that amidst the top performers were "[Company name]" Newsletter" and even "[Company name] Sales and Marketing Newsletter". While Mailchimp is quick to note that boring doesn't necessarily equal good, these two examples have one thing going for them: they're consistent and expected. Anyone receiving these two emails knows what is going to be in them, and who is sending them.
• Use an identifiable sender name

Part expectation, part trust, sender name lets people know if some one they recognize is sending the email. In a Email Experience Council poll, 54% of readers proclaimed that they weight sender as a more influential factor for opening email than subject line.

It's also worth noting that you should always send from a company email address. If one person is identified with the newsletter, then using their address or name is a good idea too.

Matching Expectations

What are your users signing up for? Sending users email that they aren't expecting is a good way to get users to unsubscribe, or worse: mark you as spam. The key is consistency between the offer in the sign up process and what you provide. Did they sign up for deals on products? Give coupons. Did they sign up for your newsletter? Don't send them hard-sell advertisements. Do they want the latest deals from your store? Send them to 'em. If people are expecting to get something from you then they will open it. 

• Communicate how your content matches their expectations. For instance, if some one has signed up for your newsletter then use the word "newsletter" in your subject. 
• Remember that a subject is supposed to describe the contents. The purpose isn't to make a sale, it's to get people to open the email.

Affective Subject Lines

Maybe it's the history of copywriting in email marketing, but a catchy subject line is the point that everyone focuses on. I would go so far as to argue that this is of lesser importance. Unlike headlines where you are vying for a the attention of a reader who has no connection to you, subject lines should be reflective of an ongoing relationship and discussing something that interests them.

However, if you've got the above in the bag, then you don't need to be a brilliant copywriter. Just take a subject that your readers care about, that is in your email, and state it. Sure there are all sorts of rhetorical tricks for creating tension and making readers interested, but if a reader has already displayed interest by signing up, expects what you're sending, and then sees a subject that they care about...

...well, they're going to open.

Examples:

The following examples illustrate several of the theories discussed above. All are formatted as [sender] - [subject].

Blair Lazar - Extreme News

I've mentioned Blair's email marketing before. It's good, especially for such a small company. Their headlines, however, leave out any kind of affective message. Instead they just opt for the somewhat boring "Extreme News". 

Is this bad? Not persay. In fact, given that their campaign is based around news and their goal is (or at least appears to be) relationship management, the use of a boring headline may actually be favorable to both their open rate and customer relationship maintenance, though I wonder about how much directly attributable profit comes from these campaigns.

What might cause a problem is the use of his last name in the "from" address. However if I were to receive this today as a new user would I know who "Blair Lazar" is? Would I connect him to Blair's hotsauce? Would I consider "Extreme News" something I wanted to read?

Tough call.

Winzip - Why Is Your PC So Slow

While the subject may be effective at hitting a subject that readers care about, there are more problems with this than I can count. 

For one the signup process for Winzip is designed to incur permission by making people assume that they need to enter an email address to download Winzip software, meaning that people aren't really signing up expecting to receive anything. When they do receive email it is a hard-sell for a product with no apparent connection to winzip. Bad for trust, and not what people expect.

The opposite of Blair's campaign, this may work as a means to achieve the goal of selling a product (and likely getting a commission or some such), but I bet that the "report as spam" rate is through the roof. Not to mention the incredibly shady practice of proclaiming on your sign up page that "We do not share e-mail addresses with any third parties", then sending you advertisements from third parties through your own mail service probably destroys customer trust.

Natural Wellbeing - February Newsletter: Cold sores & Thinning Hair

A client of ours, Natural Wellbeing, does their own email marketing. However, I frequently chat with their email marketer, and was discussing the ideas above with him leading up to his last email subject line test. Deciding to switch their subject lines around a bit, from "February health tips - the Natural Wellbeing Newsletter" to the above. When tested the above resulted in a 33% increase in open rate, and even more impressive, a whopping 60% increase in click through, sending traffic soaring.

What's right here? Identifiable sender name immediately following an email identifier that matches what the reader expects to see, and finally a subject that the reader is interested in. Simple, nothing about it that makes you go "wow", but it works.  

From the warm sunny location of the Winter Olympics, it's another Monday Roundup. This week we have sunny +8 weather (highs of +12!), why keywords are overrated, using Google Insights for Search, and why the iPad(/pod/phone) will never have Flash.

• Keywrods are over-rated. Or at least, "ClickEquations" seems to think so. Well, not entirely. Rather they argue that we spend too much time thinking about keywords and too little thinking about the search queries that those keywords are supposed to capture.
• There's been a lot of talk about Facebook over the last few months, but "Retail. Shaken, not Stirred." has a slightly different take. Ignoring privacy options, instead they discuss 3 steps to a more effective retail Facebook presence.

• Neither I nor SixRevisions should have to tell you this, but there are rules to follow when saving images for the web. PNG's, JPEG's, GIF's, they all have their uses (GIF's a little less so), and there are right ways to save each. SixRevisions covers how to make sure that your iamges are small enough but still look good, maximizing your look and your loading speed.
• Yeah, the iPad doesn't have Flash support. It likely never will. Over at "Roughly Drafted" Morgan Adams explains that the problem with Flash on multitouch devices is much more complex than battery life or crashes. Flash applications inherently rely on mouse-over, a function that doesn't exist on multitouch devices, and the solutions for solving this simply aren't functional.

• Avinash is back, this time with 7 Competitive Intelligence Data Sources.
• This topics always fascinates me. "Kaizen Analytics" has how to measure offline events with insights for search. IfS is a pretty awesome tool, giving you the ability to mine the zietgeist for all kinds of information and search data.

• Google Buzz. Seems an odd topic for the usability section. However this BBC article admits something damning about it: Buzz was only tested internally. Google, the creators of Google Website Optimizer, did no user testing on Google Buzz. The effect? A bug that produced damning PR, and severely hurt their launch. Yes folks, this is why you test.
• UX Matters has a case study on rapid desirability testing.

• Oh my god I can do it I can do it. I can do keyword bookmarking with Chrome. Truthfully this is the one thing that was holding me back from switching, since the lack of a second search bar made it hard to, say, quickly look something up on dictionary.com, or Wikipedia, or WolframAlpha. Now I have "=" set to Wolfram (so I can type "= (16(32+64+128)*15^6)/7" into the awesome bar and have it spit out 5.832 x 10^9) "def" set to dictionary.com, and "syn" set to thesaurus.com. This, plus adblock, is really making Chrome a serious contender for me most used browser.
• So you might know the ACTA internet chapter, a global law (well, treaty) to combat unauthorized file sharing is in talks and has leaked online. After three (is it 4 now? I don't remember) failed attempts to push a new copyright law through Canada, it looks like the legislative system may be circumvented entirely in favour of setting law through international trade agreements. Michael Giest looks at the law and breaks down some of the reasons that this is a scary prospect. These include:
  • Notice-and-Takedown: Companies who want to maintain safeharbour status (can't be sued for the actions of their users) would have to change from their current self-imposed "notice-to-notice" system (where they have to contact alleged infringing parties) to a notice-to-take-down system (where they have to immediately take down any media/block access to infringing material).
    
    To understand why this is scary, look at the abuse of Google's notice-to-take-down system in regards to perfectly legal Youtube videos. Now this would be applied across the board.
  • Anti-Circumvention: Makes it illegal to circumvent copy protection. This includes ripping a CD to your hard drive that contains DRM, or ripping a DVD so that you can play them on a media PC. This isn't "oh they could sue you", it would make it [em]criminal[/em].
  • 3 strikes: While not a defined part, the agreement promotes it as a way of preventing your company from losing safeharbour provisions. The effect of it? If you're accused (not found guilty, accused) of infringement three times you're banned from the service.
  
  Now you might think "oh well, make some hassle for the silly pirates." Nope, this extends well beyond music and movies and includes pharmaceuticals, agriculture, biotech, and pretty much everything else.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the importance of making the user experience a core value. Today I'd like to discuss another shift in mindset that must occur before a user-centered web design process can succeed.

Design and development of a modern website is too complex a task to just "pull out of the air" and get right the first time. No matter how clever and well trained your team is, there are simply too many elements to consider (many of which, including user expectations, are in a constant state of flux).

And yet, at many organizations, design and development teams are still expected to get everything right the first time — usually without any formal process for testing and/or consulting with actual users.

This mindset must change. Management — and the entire design and development team — must understand that web development is a continual, iterative process. You must be willing to put your ideas out there, get feedback, make changes, launch again, get more feedback, make more changes... in a never-ending process of incremental improvement.

Most importantly, everyone involved must fully appreciate that an iterative process is not about "fixing errors". It's about testing new ideas, being willing to accept user feedback, and being willing to adapt. If an idea doesn't work, nobody should have to worry about losing their job. Even "failures" should be embraced, as they represent a learning opportunity.

We have big plans for our blog. Big plans. One of them is moving away from Blog.cfc and to Wordpress. As such we've been racking our brains over what SEO stuff we need in order to make sure that our blog maintains as much of its juicyness as possible.

Fortunately Wordpress has a ton of plugins to make sure that your blog is as optimized as possible. Below are some of our favourites:

Titles and Meta Tags

All in One SEO pack

A true superpack. Including canonical URLs, fine tuning of navigational links, title and meta description generation, and more, it has more options than I care to count, and yet can be setup easily by a newbie like me.

Headspace

Much like All in One SEO Pack, Urban Giraffe's Headspace manages metadata and titles. Providing a tag based system that manages data across your blog, headspace takes a lot of the hassle out of titles and metatags.

URL's and Redirection

Redirection

At some point you are going to have to redirect a page. You'll change a post URL, or maybe a date, and then you're going to find that in the 10 seconds that some one like SEOmoz grabbed your post out of your RSS feed and is now linking to it from. Then you're either going to have to contact them and change to the new link, or redirect that old page to the new one.

Redirection makes this a breeze. It monitors 404 errors to let you know where you need to redirect from and creates an RSS feed of them so that you can see what's going on. It automatically creates redirections based upon URLs, browsers, referring sites, or login status. It automatically does a 301 redirection when a post's URL changes. Basically a must have.

SEO Slugs

Maybe not as good as writing your own slugs, but a hell of a lot easier. SEO Slugs removes common words (such as 'a', 'the', 'in') from your posts.

Google XML Sitemaps

We've already talked about the importance of XML sitemaps. This plugin generates them automatically , allowing crawlers to more easily see your site, as well as notifying major engines every time you create a post.

Links

RSS Footer

This wonderfully simple plugin does one thing: it adds a line of content to each article in your feed with a link back to your blog. Why do this? When scrapers collect your content it directs search engines back towards the original content, helping Google know what the original is, as well as providing some nice link juice.

Internal Link Building

Internal Link Building lets you assign keywords to specific URLs, then automatically link sto those URL's when that word appears on your site—similar to wikipedia—creating link-juice flow across your blog.

Misc

WP Super Cache

One of these day's you're going to get something on the front page of Digg or Reddit or what have you, and traffic is going to spike on your server. With wordpress generating each page through calls to the php data base this can quickly overload your server. WP Super Cache generates static html pages out of your wordpress blog, keeping your server running and your visitors happy.

Yoast Breadcrumbs

Yoast is a proponent of breadcrumbs. As such, he has created a plugin to provide rather nice breadcrumbs to wordpress.

While writing a post on the roles of personalization in email marketing I came across an interesting series of studiesover at Psyblog suggesting that promising rewards can have negative effects on overall performance in both children and adults. This has interesting implications for email marketers who often base their campaigns on "reward" models, where subscribers are likely to get something for signing up.

Lepper et al., 1973found that a series of children were given rewards for drawing. Those who were told before they started drawing that they would be rewarded drew less over the next several days; those told after the initial drawing session drew about twice as much over the next six days; and those surprised by the reward drew the most (though only a few percent more than the second group).

Similarly studies of adult smokers (Curry et al., 2009) found that those rewarded performed well initially, but bell behind in the long run.

In email marketing a clear and defined promise can more readily entice readers to take a small action (like, say, sign up) but at the same time those who are already inclined to do so may be less likely to continue through in the long run.

On the other hand, surprising your audience with stuff like coupons and other intensives may have a positive effect, increasing long term interaction and customer relationship.

Well, it's something to test.

If we could harvest the sheer energy pulsating through the central district of Vancouver we could power North America for years. Of course if you step out side of the Olympic areas the city is empty, its populace all drawn into the center. This makes sitting near a window looking out on downtown a very difficult place to be.

This week we've got olympic fever. We've also got studies on what makes things go viral, reasons why developers should use Chrome, and loads of email marketing advice.

• You probably know this already, but Google Buzz launches yesterday with a whole host of privacy problems. What's getting me even more, though, is the ammount of misinformation that's been cycling about Google Buzz. From "it makes all your email public" to "it tells people where you are" (well it does if you decide to put that information on your profile page).
• I find it funny that people always tell me to "keep it short". I've been frequently told that short posts are more popular than long posts, that easily digestible content is greater than informative content. Meanwhile I've found that not only does that not mesh with me (I read and share long posts, short ones I skim then forget) but it also doesn't show in any of our numbers. Well, the New York Times reports that a recent study confirmed that, amongst other things, long stories get shared more. They predict that this may be because long stories often cover more engaging topics (which does throw off the data in this situation) but I'd also argue that longer topics provide more engagement, in general. More engagement means that people are more likely to pass it around, while stub like articles are more likely to get skimmed quickly than forgotten.

• Google also announced Google Fiber last week. An interesting, potentially awesome, and potentially scary prospect. Not sure how I feel about Google entering the ISP business these days, given how pervasive they are in everything else.
• That said, I still agree with nettuts on why web developers should be using Chrome. Chrome integrates some of the best Firefox plugins (firebug mostly) straight into the browser. Also, while nettuts doesn't mention it, IE Tab totally rocks.

• Google is pushing mobile development right now, for obvious reasons. The Adwords blog continues this with its Go Mobile! series which, last week, includes optimizing for mobile with Google Analytics.
• Somewhat similarly, e-nor has customizing your user experience with GA. This is basically just a bunch of ways to use GA cookies to do fun stuff with your site, such as visitor counters, and view counters.

• Where was all this the week before last? Well, these will still be useful when I actually redesign our newsletter, instead of just adjusting it: Email Newsletter Design: Guidelines And Examples, which gives some great advice, though some of it is risky. For instance, they praise the headline "Sizzling Summer Deals", while Mailchimp studies show that these kinds of subjects often have lower open rates.
• Marketing Experiments has a presentation on improving email clickthrough. This is the same case they were talking about at Connections '09, which was a very good presentation.

• The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google's 2009 annual report names facebook, amazon, and vertical search as competitors [account required].
• Finally, Out of my Gord continues his "the Psychology of Entertainment" series with Why We're Hooked on Action Thrillers. While I like the direction he took with this (how suspense causes the release of cortisol, adrenaline and noradrenaline) the sheerly biopsych approach misses an important social aspect of the action film. In a society which openly promotes an ideology of empowered individualism the male power fantasy becomes a crucial part of the very idea of what it means to "be some one". And most major American films reflect this, even the dramas.

People love a jackass. They love to talk about jackasses. And even more, they love to show other people how much of a jackass some one is. They will tell their friends. They will tell their family. They will post links on message boards pointing at the jackass. And that's where it comes in. The Jackass hook. An unreal amount of links from people who want nothing more than to tell other people about how much they hate you.

Disclaimer:

While we will take credit for any links you receive as a result of these guidelines, we take ABSOLUTELY NO responsibility for anything else. This includes bad press, hurt reputations, angry partners, lawsuits, bankruptcy, death threats, and actual death.

1. Troll blogs and leave your link in your post. Bonus points if you troll them for not nofollowing their comment links.
2. Sue a big company claiming that you own the patent on something inane. Short for ideas? Take a que from Microsoft and patent something like displaying numbers within a box.
3. Sue some one small, like a little girl.
4. Claim to be the real Kanye West. Then die or something.
5. Post cartoons of famous people doing obscene things
6. Sell a product on Ebay, then declare that people didn't big high enough and refuse to honor it.
7. Link to people with insulting GA campaign variables, then leave your website as "source".
8. Send out reciprocal link requests asking for ridiculous spammy anchor text then wait for people to write blog posts about you (no wait that doesn't work).
9. Create an attractive-but-fake Plenty of Fish profile and tell lonely men that you will sleep them if they link to your website. Afterwards reveal that you're a man.
10. ...then write about what losers they were.
11. Release the passwords of every Hotmail user in a text file.
12. Censor Wikipedia entries on prominent political figures.
13. Create a contest for prominent bloggers and offer an iPad as a prize. Then when some one wins don't give them the prize.
14. Write negatively about a company you work with while openly being paid by their competitor.
15. Call out another company in your industry for building links in a way that you think gives them an unfair advantage, getting Google to cancel the linkjuice from it.
16. Take a popular, recently published piece of content and re-post it as your own work.
17. Expose some ones secret life in a shocking exposé.
18. Protest funerals of the likes of cancer victims and dead soldiers, holding insulting signs and your website's URL. 
19. Demand your critics "man up" and enter a boxing match with you. Weed out any that have more fighting experience, or are bigger than you. Then beat them senseless.
20. Rant about something innocuous and say that it is ruining society, bonus points if you can be intensely racist, sexist, or homophobic while doing it. Like, say, that soy is making kids gay.

But under no circumstances, none, should you spam the VKI Studios blog. That's too much, folks.

For years, I believed my mission as a usability professional was to act as a user advocate. In fact, "User Champion" was once part of my official job title. At the risk of sounding sacrilegious, I now believe this concept is wrong-headed.

If you position yourself as an advocate for the user, you will often encounter resistance from the development team. They don't want to change course just because some self-proclaimed "user advocate" believes certain changes are necessary. They may not be convinced you're right; they may believe that they themselves know what customers really want. And they'll push back.

What's the solution? Easy. Rather than claiming to be an advocate for the user, be an advocate for the process. That is, the process of user-centered design, and/or the process of A/B and multivariate testing. When someone asks you (for example) how a new form should be laid out, you can say, "Let's test it and find out."

Then you can run some usability tests (or some A/B tests, or whatever is appropriate) and find the correct answer. When you return armed with actual data, the development team will be much more enthusiastic about implementing your recommendations.

In sum, my tip for the day is this: Advocate for the process, not for the user. You'll go farther.

I was putting the finishing touches on our VKI Newsletter today when I noticed that we still had 10 ExactTarget inbox preview credits which were soon to expire. As I had just rewritten our template, I decided to give it a run through ET's tool and see if it would turn up anything that my other tests had not. 

For the most part the test went well, but under reputation I noticed the following:

Body Domains: Evaluates the reputation of domains used in all Links & Image URLs. URIBL Blacklist: Contains a URL domain listed in the URIBL BLACKLIST. Description http://www.uribl.com/about.shtml#info. Delisting guidance: http://www.uribl.com/faq.shtml#q2. ow.ly] (rule-id: 1689) 1.961

After a bit of a scare I notice that the domain was not ours, but rather a link I had in my email. The link was to ow.ly.

Yes. The URL shortener.

One of the thing's that spam lists look at, of course, is what the email you're sending is linking to. Apparently ow.ly is so commonly used by spammers that the URI Blacklist has placed it on the blacklist. Our email report gives is a 1.9 at that, which is a high score.

I decided to look up a bunch of URL shorteners and here are the results:

clop.in NOT Listed on URIBL

ow.ly Listed on URIBL black (details) Listed: 2010-01-31 20:12:08 GMT

tinyurl.com Listed on URIBL white (details) Listed: 2005-05-10 15:01:33 GMT

cli.gs NOT Listed on URIBL

bit.ly NOT Listed on URIBL

is.gd NOT Listed on URIBL

tr.im NOT Listed on URIBL

So ow.ly is black listed, tinyurl is whitelisted, and the rest are not listed. If you're nervous about ow.ly then by all means use another service (I like clop.in) but I am willing to bet that given ow.ly's current fame they will be off the blacklist, and possibly even on the white list, incredibly soon.