Usability expert Jakob Nielsen recently published a study of close to 100 transactional e-mails conducted in two phases, five years apart. The results aren’t pretty.
“Judging by many of the messages we tested, e-mail design often seems to be a side effect of the software implementation and consists of copy written by the programmer late at night,” he wrote. “Alternatively (and even worse), some messages are hard-hitting, written by aggressive sales people without a true understanding of Internet marketing's emphasis on relationship building.”
Besides order and service confirmations and shipment notifications, Nielsen said his firm also tested reservation confirmations and e-tickets, available-now notices, billing and payment notices, cancellations, returns, refunds, rebates, bonuses; information-request responses; government responses; customer-service messages; failure notices; and registration and account information.
“As the many message types show, transactional e-mail offers abundant opportunities for enhancing a site's relationship with its customers,” he wrote.
Unfortunately, most companies are apparently failing to take advantage of the opportunity.
Nielsen also concluded that marketers’ use of transactional messages didn’t improve in the five years between the two studies.
“Transactional messages continue to exhibit the same amount of usability problems as we saw five years ago: vague subject lines continue to dominate, and the body text of many messages continues to be too long, too difficult to scan, and too lacking in clear facts important to users,” he wrote.
In order to make transactional e-mails work, Nielsen recommends that the “from” line in the message contain the company’s brand name rather than a person’s name. People generally only open messages from senders they recognize, he noted.
He also recommends the “from” line be no longer than 20 to 25 characters so the name doesn’t get truncated. Nielsen recommends that the subject line be meaningful to the transaction, such as “your order has been shipped” as opposed to “shipping information.”
Nielsen’s whole post and a link to his study can be accessed here.
