Email Newsletters, or simply newsletters, are an extremely efficient way to communicate your brand, message or whatever you want to say clearly, easily and economically. My Internet consulting firm, Dunkirk Systems, LLC, now offers newsletter services, and we have started a newsletter for our clients. As great as they are, most every one has a fatal flaw that can cause subscribers to be involuntarily unsubscribed without them knowing.

Have I scared anyone yet? It may or may not be that big of an issue, but it needs to be recognized. Just about every newsletter has an unsubscribe link which will almost instantly block the subscriber from ever getting another email from the sender. This is a good thing. Not only does it help people manage their email, but it complies with the CAN-SPAM Act. The link to unsubscribe is usually very prominent in a newsletter, and can even be in multiple places. The link is most always built into the design, and the key words there are “built into” as this means that link will be passed along with the newsletter if the email message that delivered it is forwarded to others within an email program or Web interface.

In other words, if you receive an email from someone containing a forwarded newsletter, if you click on the unsubscribe link in the newsletter, you have unsubscribed that person from it! As my 15-month old daughter would say, “uh-oh.” It is not to say every time a newsletter is forwarded this will happen, rather it is to say there is a reality it can happen and everybody needs to be aware of it.

So how can this be prevented? The person who received the newsletter and wants to forward it to others can simply delete the link from the message before they send it. That is, if they remember to. For the newsletter sender, they can always add a “forward to a friend link” to the newsletter as many email marketing services offer this, including Dunkirk. Some may either ignore this or may choose not to use it, namely as the forwarder may not want their recipients tracked. Plus it’s much easier to hit the forward button in an email program and enter a few auto-completed recipients and press send instead of using a forward function of a newsletter.

Just some friendly advice for readers of The Hot Iron, as well as a call to action to email marketing services to brainstorm ideas to prevent this. In case you were wondering if I have ever unsubscribed anyone from a newsletter inadvertently, I plead the fifth!

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Business • Technology • (3) Comments • Permalink

Upon returning home from even a short shopping trip – be careful, be very careful. As you open up your wallet or purse, do it very slowly as you could be seriously injured. Why? The larger-than-necessary register receipts you got at each retail establishment can spring out and surprise you!

Of course this is an exaggeration, but have you noticed the length of the receipt you got at the retail store lately? It isn’t just a record of your purchases anymore. It will include large branding, upsell offers (though you already checked out), enticements to enter contests to win prizes by completing a customer service survey, among other verbose information. In most cases, this “extra stuff” takes up more space on the receipt than the list of items purchased. The pictures receipt, from Walgreens for a few items, is over a foot long.

There has to be a better way. Many stores know exactly who you are for many reasons – they will ask you directly, you have a “membership” card for the store and some even track information about you based on your credit card number. You already get information from stores by email or post mail, why not do the same with your proof of purchase?

Rather than give you this monstrous piece of paper, why not just email it to you, or make it available in a Web portal? There may be some local laws which require a receipt upon purchase. How about send it by SMS (or as we say in the US, text message)? The message will have the purchase Id, which can be looked up online or at the kiosk in the store. If I am registered with the store, I can receive an email with an attached PDF of the receipt or my purchase detailed in the message body. All purchases would be available online. Hey, can’t you do this already with Amazon.com?

There are many reasons to do this, and here they are in no particular order. One is environmental, saving paper and ink. The other is convenience, so people don’t have to have all kinds of slips of paper stuffed away. Most important to me is organizational – if I need to submit a receipt for an expense, I have it available to me at anytime and from any device on the Internet.

So brick-and-mortar retailers, are you in? I hear Apple stores already do this, which doesn’t surprise me. How about the major grocery conglomerates like Supervalu, Kroger, Ahold and Wal-Mart? Help the consumer save a tree, space and time all while being forward-thinking and trendy like Apple.

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The next time you are on a Web site, look for a link titled “sitemap” or even “site map.” When you find it, chances are it is at the bottom of the Web site page buried deep in the footer of the page. If you find it prominently at the top of the page, congratulations! You have visited a Web site that wants you to find the information you are looking for.

Sitemaps (I prefer to spell them as 1-word) were originally added to Web sites to benefit not the Web visitor but search engines. On a sitemap page is a link to every page of the Web site. Ideally, when a search engine crawls the sitemap page, it will take in every page of the Web site into its search index. These pages are typically a lot of static links, with descriptive titles to help define the keywords for each link. Sitemap pages have been effective, especially with Google and now Bing allowing you to register a Web site and submit its sitemap page link.

People-Friendly

It didn’t take long for people to realize the sitemap page was a quick way to find the information they were looking for, especially if the Web site does not have a search function. The pages tend to be clear of excessive branding and gives you a quick view to determine if the information you are looking for is on the Web site or not. That is if you were able to find the sitemap page link. Their placement at the footer of the Web site’s pages was for it didn’t need to be that prominently presented for a search engine to find it.

To XML And Beyond

More recently the sitemap page has been accompanied by an XML file which contains all of the links on the sitemap page. This way, a search engine doesn’t have to do too much work to get to the reason it goes to the sitemap – to get the links to all pages of a Web site and nothing else. Many modern content management systems will generate an XML file, or there are 3rd-party services which will create one from either a static sitemap page or by crawling the Web site itself.

If your Web site has a sitemap link, promote it! Place it in your main navigation for all to see. Track the hits to the page to see how effective it is. If you don’t have an XML file to accompany it, create one and register the XML file with the search engines. If you don’t have either, there’s no time like the present to start making your Web site friendlier to man and machine.

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Technology • (3) Comments • Permalink

One of the great features of blogging is comments. Getting feedback from people who read what you write, where not always on your side, is important to having a conversation. Not all blogs allow comments, though, for whatever reason. One reason often mentioned is content spamming, where people who don’t care what you write and are only interested in getting links on your site is their reason for leaving a comment. Where spam is a reality of life, it is unfortunate if it stifles a dialog on your blog. But do methods to prevent spam also stifle conversations?

A medium for some blog owners is to require someone to log into their blog to post a comment. By doing so, the commenter has identified themselves which “legitimizes” the comments they post. The login account a commenter creates may be specifically to that particular site or to a particular blog platform, such as WordPress. There are also many third-party authentication and blog comment services, such as OpenID and Disqus, which some blogs use. And in some cases, you can even use your Twitter or Facebook login to identify yourself prior to posting a comment.

Any type of login or authentication, in general, will prevent people from interacting with you. This doesn’t apply to blogs only, but any other Web application including eCommerce. If you take a look at adding a login to a blog from the user’s perspective, you could be in essence blocking people from commenting on your blog. The need to create yet another login account to add to the burgeoning list they already have will prevent some people from doing so to leave a comment, especially if they are reading your blog for the first time. Even using the third-party services I mentioned previously, some users don’t understand how those work, and by creating an account with them is adding to that burgeoning list even more.

By requiring people to log in, you are blocking anonymous comments. Some people may wish to contribute something to the conversation on your blog, but they may not want to identify themselves. Whether they simply choose not to identify themselves or are concerned with their name being attached to what they are saying, anonymous comments can be legitimate comments. Think in real-life how you may have a chat with someone in passing, whether at a bar or on a subway car? You may never know who they are, but what they had to say was a contribution.

I present this opinion not only to initiate a conversation, but also to easily pass along my opinions on requiring blog login the next time I run into one. Comments are open, no login required.

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Blogging • Technology • (3) Comments • Permalink

I always wanted to put this disclaimer on a Web site, “No stock media was harmed in the creation of this Web site.” Where there is some sarcasm in the message, it also shows my preference to not use stock media, whether they are drawings, photography or video. Why you ask? A major reason is that somebody may notice, which only gets magnified if it is shown on national television! This video below is from The Jay Leno Show where someone sent in print advertisement with the same stock photo of a family used for different companies.

If you don’t see the above video, you can view it with this link.

There is demand for stock media as it is much less costly than custom-created media. Depending on the purpose, it may make perfect sense to use stock media. Do you want to use the skyline of a particular city on a Web site? It makes more sense to pay a few dollars for an image than to hire a photographer and an airplane to take the shot. For other “generic” items the same reasoning can apply. You most likely will not find specific items, such as brands, available as stock media.

So why is stock media much less expensive than custom media? The reason is non-exclusivity. This means you purchase the license to use the media for a particular purpose, such as on a Web site, and somebody else can do the same for their Web site, or brochure or other display purposes. The reason the family was shown in the video for 3 different insurance companies is because it was probably categorized as such, and when a search was performed it came up under the insurance category.

As cost is a deciding factor, stock media is often chosen if the budget does not allow for custom media. Note I am not criticizing the quality of the media itself – it is most all done by professionals and is of high quality. However as it is created to be used for many purposes, it can look very generic and not specific to a locale or industry. As Web users become more sophisticated, they can often recognize a photo that doesn’t look like it completely fits on the Web site. A good example is when a company shows photos of its management team, yet none of them are in the photo of people sitting around a table on another Web page.

In addition to the photos themselves appearing in multiple places, many times you can even recognize some of the people in other places. At a former employer stock photos were used on the Web site. Shortly after I saw one of the women from the Web site in signs in CVS and Staples stores! Granted I worked on the redesign of the Web site that used these photos and was much closer to them as well. For our budget, we could have taken photos exclusive for our use, and they would have also been more realistic looking as well.

When it comes time to design or redesign your Web site, think about the media you will be using as much as the content. If you can afford it, go with custom media. You will get greater control of the scenes as well as have a completely unique user experience.

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Business • Technology • (0) Comments • Permalink