Most business processes or transactions involve sending people email.
In our experience, this is one area that is often neglected but needs careful attention to ensure the recipient actually reads the email (and if you don't care whether they read the email, then you may as well not send it to them).
As process consultants we have expertise and tools to make sure your transactional emails get read.
Email as part of the process
Email is often a vital part of a process and transaction, whether it is a confirmation of an event such as order placement or notifying someone that they have to now participate in a process. Unfortunately email – especially over the Internet – is a complex business.
Three hurdles
You need to jump over three hurdles to have a user act on your email.
1. Avoid spam filters and get into the inbox:
If your email gets blocked by spam filters (such as Postini, MessageLabs or even Outlook's Junk filter) it is unlikely to be seen by the user. We can:
- Advise how some of the most popular anti-span systems work.
- Help rewrite your emails to reduce the probability that they're falsely identified as spam.
- Work with your IT department to ensure your email infrastructure is set up correctly so that your email isn't seen as coming from a domain that sends spam.
2. Be recognised in the inbox (and opened)
Users scan their inboxes to determine which mails to open, which to ignore and which to delete without opening. We can:
- Explain the research to you and assess how your email would be seen in a user's inbox.
- Show you how your email appears in different mail clients' inboxes.
- Help rewrite the sender, subject line and initial content to increase the probability that the user will recognise and open the email.
- Conduct user-testing of possible emails.
3. Be read and acted on
Once the user has opened the email we can:
- Explain the research to you and assess how your email would be read by a user.
- Test and show you how your email appears in different mail clients. We will make sure that it is displayed correctly so the user can read it.
- Re-write the email to increase online readability and ensure that the point of the email is easily understood.
- Conduct user-testing of candidate emails.
We always take a user-centric view of the process and advise you generally on the use of email within the process.
Emails (and other communication methods such as SMS) need to be recognisably part of the same process as a web site/form the user has seen.
They also need to be appropriate. For example we have seen processes where a user gets exactly the same email – "you have a new task for process x" – five times a day, and the organisation wondered why the emails were being ignored!
Finally, we are not in the business of Internet Marketing and promoting unsolicited commercial email (the nice name for spam).
We only offer our services to help people deliver transactional and process-focussed email to users participating in the process.
