Be Good to Your Users, and They will be Good Right Back
Thursday, January 28 2010 - trust, user-experience
A couple of days ago, I received this email:
I had signed up for the Avery newsletter a long time ago, when I downloaded some templates for Microsoft Word. I figured I’d give them a shot and see what kind of content they would provide. Nothing so far has particularly been useful to me, but I did see the content as valuable, and something might come along in a newsletter that I could use, so I kept it around. It is also quite nice that it really is only a monthly newsletter, so it doesn’t bog down my inbox much at all.
Now, I have no idea why they sent this to me particularly, but I can think of two possible reasons: 1) They sent it out to all of their newsletter subscribers or 2) They sent it out to the newsletter subscribers that haven’t clicked on a newsletter link in quite some time, if at all. In both cases (but especially the latter case), this is a great thing to do for your users and here’s why.
Engendering Trust
If you want to keep your users coming back, they need to trust your site. Doing things like making it very hard to unsubscribe to your newsletter is one way to destroy that trust. Another is automatically subscribing them when they register, or defaulting the subscribe checkbox on your registration form to checked. In some places, I believe it is actually illegal to automatically subscribe users without giving them the option to opt out. And I really do believe that it is a questionable business practice to have subscription checkboxes checked by default on a registration form, since most people know by now (and research backs it up) that users have form submission so ingrained into their heads by now that all they do is quickly fill in the text fields and click submit – rarely reading anything on the form. Having the checkbox covers you legally, but I still don’t agree that it is a good business practice to do it this way if you want your users to trust you.
An email like this also engenders trust by showing that they are willing to let me go if I no longer value what they are providing. Since I haven’t clicked on a link in their newsletters up until now, they are assuming that the content they are providing in that format may not be right for me, and making it easy for me to leave. This definitely makes me trust Avery as a company more than I would if they had sent nothing at all. In reality, this was a brilliant marketing strategy on their part.
Your Users’ Time is Valuable
My time is valuable. Your time is valuable as well. Even more importantly, your users’ time is valuable. Most newsletters make it very difficult to unsubscribe. If you can even read the little unsubscribe note on the bottom of those emails, the steps you have to jump through in order to unsubscribe are often ridiculous. Sometimes they make you send an email to unsubscribe and other times you have to enter your email address on a form, even though the link you clicked on came from an email, so they should know what it is. Both of these practices lead me to question the validity of the unsubscribe, especially if I didn’t remember signing up for the newsletter explicitly. Why are they asking for an email address that they supposedly already have? When I click on the “NO” link in this email from Avery, I get this screen:
I understand that they are essentially doing the same thing, but they do make it much easier for me. This saves me time that is better spent on other things. They could still take it a step further, however, by removing this screen and just removing me from the list, but at least it is a step in the right direction. They already saved me potentially a couple of minutes in just making it easy for me to get to the unsubscribe page, so I’ll forgive them for the transgression in this case. I am much more likely to continue visiting a site and supporting a company that makes it easy for me to do the things that I am trying to do on their site.
Another great example of this is Amazon. It is very easy for me to find a product, add it to my cart and then check out. They don’t bombard me with a ton of extra steps, even with a completely new registration. They do make me register, which some people would deem as not necessary for the easiest workflow for a user, but I’m still not completely sold on that point. Now, at every step along the process, they do try everything in their power to get me to buy more products, but it is done in a somewhat unobtrusive manner. In no way do their cross-sells and up-sells slow me down or prevent me from completing my purchase. The buttons to continue the process are always clear and stand out among all of the other content on the page, so it really doesn’t take any extra time, even with all that extra content, unless I find something else that they are offering appealing.
Conclusion
These are just a couple of ways where it shows that if you are good to your users, they will be good to you right back. This simple email to me, offering to let me go if I want to, has shown me that Avery is a decent company and one that I am likely to continue to support. By building my trust in them and understanding that my time is valuable, they have shown that they care about me, even just a little bit. In the world today, where your competitor is just a single click away, showing that you care is the most important thing that you can do.
