Usability Fail
Today I was looking for some photo/disk mailers that Australia Post offer for sale in every one of their postal shops.
Jumped onto their online shop.
Navigation failed to turn up anything relevant.
So I used search.
“Disk mailer” — no results (and no helpful suggestions).
“Disk” — no results
Hmmm, so I grabbed one of the mailers off the shelf that I have (a few left, need more!).
Ah ha!
“Computer Disk & Photo Mailer” — no results.
Product code on the product is “DP” — no results.
Size is 150mm x 200mm … so “150mm” — no results.
Went to their online pdf catalogue … finally found the product with a new product code.
“Bx9″ — no results.
“CDs And Photos” as it is called now — no results.
Seven separate searches for the product … using the old name, old code, new name, new code, common “tag” words … nothing.
Zilch, zip, nada.
I wonder if a real user actually tested their online shop or search feature?
I guess now they don’t sell their own products in their online shop.
But nothing — nothing at all — informed me about that in their search pages or results.
Finally I found they also have an online stationery shop.
Great, it must be there!
No results.
They don’t even sell their own products in their stationery shop.
Can it get worse?
Yep!
In the online PDF catalogue I found earlier, I get to “print” the sheet with the product on it.
But not to order it.
Not even “how to order”.
The printed sheet defaults to Sydney 2000 to find the nearest postal outlet.
So I reset that to my postcode.
And then on that printed sheet — NONE of the three nearest postal outlets that stock this item are listed!
Not my town, or the nearest two towns.
Only the big “shops” not the licensed postal outlets — that all stock this item.
No wonder they say they face “challenges ahead.”
Let’s do the MailChimp Time Warp
No, not the song and dance variety I so fondly remember from High School days!
I’m talking about the latest version of the mail manager MailChimp — and it’s geo-targeted Time Warp feature.
It means you can, in MailChimp’s words:
Pick what time of day you want your campaign delivered, send once, and we’ll automatically deliver it at the same local time in every time zone on the planet.
Lots more info on the MailChimp blog.
Now that excited me as a marketer. Quite often in the mornings (Australian time), my inbox is full of a dozen or so spam that have arrived overnight (US daytime), and tucked inside is a message or two from a mailing list I’ve subscribed to.
That might mean I easily overlook the message and delete it with the overnight spam.
It would be much more effective if the message landed in my inbox during my working day, when my people are nearer their computer, and a time when there aren’t as likely to be a queue of spam messages piling up.
(Actually, I quite often have my email turned OFF during my working day, so that I can stay productive, but that’s a whole other story. But I’m talking in general here).
Or … depending on my testing and my prospect audience, it means I can set the timing to a personal preference that not just suits my time zone, or the time zone of my mail provider, but the time I want my subscribers (or my client’s subscribers) to see the message.
It’s not perfect of course — the data can vary a little on the geolocation, and if subscribers don’t open emails, it can be harder to figure out where they are — but it’s better than no Time Warp info at all.
To me, that’s technology put to good use!
Recognising Inbox Insanity
I was checking out the free traffic booster and backlink software called Comment Kahuna today and noticed this message on their opt-in page:
Why must you opt-in? We have several free upgrades planned soon. You will be notified about them via email. We respect your privacy and inbox sanity. You will not be hammered with a million emails or promotions. We promise.
If you’re on multiple mailing lists, and don’t manage your inbox — you very well might find yourself suffering from inbox insanity.
I recently heard an internet marketer explain how they use a different email address for EVERY list they’re on (more than 500). Personally, I don’t have the time or inclination to track my incoming traffic that ruthlessly.
Instead, I use Google mail to manage my lists. Google’s labels and filters do a great job of sorting out the mail, and also filters can be setup to ensure messages never make it into the spam box (when some marketers fail to test if the words they use will trigger spam filters).
I leave it up to Google’s experts to identify and track spam.
And I happily accept Google’s offer of more than 7Gb of free space in exchange for some ads down the right hand side (no, I don’t use a Firefox script to hide the ads — as a marketer and copywriter, I enjoy looking at Google ads to see what gets my attention).
I think the “inbox sanity” message will resonate with a lot of people. They feel overwhelmed at times, especially around product launches or event countdowns where several of the people they get mail from are all promoting the same thing.
I don’t condemn frequent emails — actually it frustrates me to see people with very powerful lists under-utilise its potential. For example, I’m on one huge list (worldwide I would guess the numbers are in the hundreds of thousands or millions) — yet I get email from that source only a few times per year.
But back to the example above.
In this case, I think it’s a great example of keeping your antenna tuned in to the ongoing feelings of the marketplace. It’s just like watching the news or reading all of the regular magazines — if you don’t know what’s going on, you won’t know what your market is thinking!
Aircraft Safety Anomaly
While we were hurtling over New South Wales today at 939 km/hour and 10,721 metres off the ground on our Virgin Blue flight (in Sardine Class) to Coolangatta, I was thinking about the safety demonstration the cabin crew go through at the start of every flight (as you would when your mind wanders during downtime on flights in Sardine Class!
The first thing the cabin crew do is advise that you should pay careful attention to the safety demonstration/presentation, no matter what your flying experience. Then, they advise that each person has a safety card in the seat pocket in front of them and that you should look through it BEFORE take-off.
You are, of course, already taxiing to the runway.
They then continue with the rest of the demonstration — seatbelts, life jackets, exits etc … yet verbally they just told you to stop paying attention and read the safety card before take-off, which is looming rather fast!
How can you possible follow both conflicting instructions? Shouldn’t they ask you to read the safety card AFTER you’ve watched the rest of the demonstration?
As we’re now in the Litigious Age of mankind, isn’t that a potentially costly safety sequence? Someone gets injured, because their seatbelt wasn’t properly fastened, and they sue the airline as the cabin crew told them to read the safety card instead of watching how to correctly fasten the seatbelt … I’m surprised no-one has considered this issue (especially the legal or insurance types who work for the airlines)!
To me, this relates strongly at times to copywriting — saying the right things in the right sequence. Get it out of order, and you can reduce your response.
Done For You Banking
With the amount of “noise” in online marketing there’s not much these days that gets into my inbox for my direct attention. Most incoming mail is heavily filtered into folders: I’ll look at it if and when I think it’s worthwhile. I’m very protective of my inbox and it ensures I remain focused on what matters to me.
One of the emails that I do allow that privilege is the weekly Springwise newsletter of new business ideas: based on what subscribers spot and report from around the world. Along with its sister site, Trend Watching (monthly briefings on emerging consumer trends), it’s great entrepreneurial juice for the brain. Ideas sprout from the Springwise website daily, but I’m happy to take in a weekly digest.
This week again included a great idea for “done for you” style marketing: this time for wealthy clients of a private bank (Insinger de Beaufort in Amsterdam). As it says in the article, the bank realised many of its wealthy clients lacked the time or patience to deal with their personal finances — so it found a simple and convenient way to solve that problem. The bank even takes care of the entire follow-up process, including paying the bills, filing tax returns and processing business expenses!
And here’s another stroke of brilliance about this idea:
Sensing a gap in the market, Insinger de Beaufort offers its shoebox service to clients at other banks, too.
Where can you add “done for you” into your services? A related service? Something else your client normally has to do in the overall process? This should spark a ton of cross-marketing ideas with complementary businesses, to come up with your own “simple” and “easy” examples.