Web design gets close to all aspects of marketing when you go further in the application. One of these aspects is marketing and a by product of it is email marketing. Email marketing allows you to keep in constant contact with your prospects, remind yourself to clients or communicate more and more on your product and field of expertise, among other benefits. I’ve been going through some mailing reports these last days and something weird caugnt my attention. How are the people I’m communicating to reacting to the emails when not interested?

Mission: delivery !

If you follow the exact directives of good email marketing, the leader being the Email Standards Project, you would surely build a general webmail/mail app compliant email that would get swiftly delivered and would boost your stats on that aspect. You are then supposed to be able to monitor your mail through the number of opened mails and clics.

To read or not to read… ?

This is where things go fast, your contact will either read your mail and go through the process or not. Afterwards, several solutions are available. According to my stats, the easiest solution the better (on the user’s point of view)! You get marked as spam whenever the person gets fed up with your email. It might not be on the first mail but with time people have forgotten the existence of the “unsubscribe” link.

How?

Deleting is easy. If you have an informational mass mail, people will read then either delete or archive the mail. The question remaining is “what triggers the use/abuse of the “mark as spam” button? First the “mark as spam” button gets more and more prominent and easier to access to. In Gmail for example it is even positioned before the delete button. People know that this button will stop your email from ever coming back to their inbox. This therefore cuts the direct use of the unsubscribe button which would have the same result but we are now going towards the “Google mode” of using search engines… everything at hand that requires the lesser effort.

Why?

Because most of the tools used are mostly developed for the US market and the USA is the most spammed country in the world with a whopping 19,8% of spam e-mails sent. No wonder the “mark as spam” button gets handy. So this is why you have to be extra careful when doing mass mailing and email marketing.

I remember a girl who wanted to write, during my university days, a research paper on “Science and technical students and their approach to canon literature.” The first thing to be done, as she was being guided by her tutors, was to define “canon literature”. It happens that she dismissed science fiction, hence dismissing J.R.R Tolkien who entered the British canon in 1996 with “The Lord of the Rings”.

I’m saying this because sometimes, reading things out of our own world might give us other approaches to our work. These might help us improve our way of designing web sites. They might push us to other boundaries which are less rigid than just building either with creative juices and forgetting usability or doing just usability and code while forgetting the fun part of things.

You might for example tackle this report on Experts vs. Online Consumers: A Comparative Credibility Study of Health and Finance Web Sites published by a Stanford (Google anyone?) research group. This sheds some light on how experts evaluate a site according to its content, while online consumers evaluate the same sites on the basis of design. So if you want a website that sells both to experts and consumers (lightly said) you would need to have both content and design. Consumer Web Watch has a lot of other reports of that sort.

Who knows, you might even want to try Maslow’s classic psychology research on human needs where he defines the characteristics of the basic human needs and how to satisfy them. This is taught to marketing students: by designing a product that fulfills more needs than that of your competitor, your product might have more success whatever the price. Examples: Iphone, German/Italian Cars (for Europe) which can’t be sold in the US because of the need for bigger cars…

As the Dalai Lama said “Each year, go somewhere you’ve never been before”. This just might work to improve your web desiging.