Archive for May, 2008

How To Let Users Unsubscribe

May 27th, 2008 Comments(0)

Every single website want its newsletter flying to potential users’ mailboxes. Of course, they are a great marketing tool if they are well designed and if they behave properly. But websites should be careful and keep in mind that newsletters could make those users angry, specially if the content is not interesting to the them. In that case, make it easy to unsubscribe.

 

Some benefits of making easy to unsubscribe from a newsletter:

- Users will feel confident about your newsletter service,

- that could make them subscribe to new newsletters (and it will be easier for you to promote new services!),

- as a result of the first point the overall website perception will be improved and users could trust your website more than others at the moment to purchase online.

Let me show you how some websites are allowing users to unsubscribe.

 

How not to do it:

Mixx.com gives users tons of options after clicking on the "opt-out" link. Many users could think that this is done on purpose, to confuse them and to finally give up the unsubscription. Notice that all the boxes are unchecked when it is supposed that at least one should be checked:

Mixx Newsletter Procedure

 

Nokia Germany requires a password to unsubscribe. What password is it? My email password? Maybe the Nokia website password? Do users remember that? This is a really bad technique to try avoid users to unsubscribe.

Nokia Newsletter Opt-Out 

 

What happens to websites that make it difficult to unsubscribe?

Report Button

 

How to make a nice newsletter opt-out procedure

Unsubscribing to the emusic newsletter is pretty easy. It has a little bit of "bla-bla" at the beginning but most users will ignore that. Then it directly goes to the point asking if they really want to opt-out.

Important note: it is recommended not to make the opt-out too easy. Some websites include a link in the newsletter to directly unsubscribe. This is dangerous as users could click on them by mistake, if this happens they will have to lose time to subscribe again. I would recommend to make the question "do you really want to unsubscribe?"

emusic Newsletter Subscription

 

Lufthansa’s approach is great. Users have to click on the check box and then on "Cancel now". Easy solution with the proper wording.

Unsubscribing From The Lufthansa Newsletter

Popularity: 37% [?]

The Importance of Favicons

May 19th, 2008 Comments(11)

A favicon is an icon associated to a website or web page, it is also called website icon or page icon. There are several ways to implement it but the most traditional one is placing a favicon.ico image file. This image is going to be displayed in the web browser tool bar and bookmarks.

Favicons are not only important for marketing and branding proposes but also for usability:

- Favicons help the user to identify pages among the web browser tabs

- They help to visually identify bookmarks

- Because of the previous two points, they make users to save time and to make internet browsing a more comfortable experience

 

Tabs

Notice how easy it is to identify tabs if they have favicons:

Web Browser Showing Favicons In Tabs

 

Bookmarks

Users can easily search through bookmarks that have favicons:

Bookmarks With Favicons

 

The Branding Problem

Sometimes using favicons requires to make a balance between branding and usability. In the following example Google uses the same favicon for all its services. This has a positive and a negative effect: on one side different services benefit from the main Google brand if they share the same favicon, on the other side it makes difficult to differentiate different pages and services from the same company.  This a valid approach but using several favicons for different services of the same company/website could improve usability.

The Google favicon among different services:

The Google Favicon Among Services

 

Popularity: 73% [?]

Next Page »