The Unsubscribed – Designing for Conversion

Mia Horrigan

Partner ICT Strategy & Advisory Services

Zen Ex Machina

The Dreaded Txt Social Break Up

If these is how we treat our friends, how do we treat brands and organisations we have come to

Online Brand Relationships

We expend a lot of time and energy to get users to our sites

The Social Media Break Up

……and yet with a click of a button, they can be gone

Consumers Break Up Behaviour

• 91% have unsubscribed from opt-in e-mails

• 77% more cautious about providing their e-mail vs. last year

• 81% have “unliked” a company’s posts from their Facebook

• 71% more selective about “liking” a company vs. last year

• 51% expect a “like” will result in communications from the company, 40% believe it should not

• 41% have “unfollowed” a company on Twitter

Top Reasons Why Consumers Unsubscribe Via E-Mail, Facebook & Twitter - February 09, 2011 by Erica Swallow

Top Reasons Consumers Unsubscribe

Not just Technology Driving Change

• It not just because technology makes it easy to break up

• Users are getting more discerning due to content overload

Content Overload

Consumers Break Up Behaviour

Top Reasons Why Consumers Unsubscribe Via E-Mail, Facebook & Twitter - February 09, 2011 by Erica Swallow

Designing to Stop Break Ups?

• Many businesses focus exclusively on creating amazing graphics, beautiful imagery and classic typography

• The visual aesthetic is only one of many factors in conversion

• Surface design on 1 of 5 elements in User Experience

• Need to be aware of what design elements encourage subscription

• And avoid those that will result in a break up

Designing to Attract and Retain

• How do we design for conversion ?

• How can we retain subscribers?

• How do we turn “likes” into “lovers”?

We turned to Social Media as a Strategy

• Customers embracing social media

• Take the conversation to the forums where our customer were

• Embarked on a digital strategy

• Social media complimentary to existing marketing and communications

• Engage in two-way communication

Social Media Strategy

• What do we want to achieve?

• Who are our customers?

• What are the messages to these Customers?

• How do our Consumers want to be engaged?

• What are our competitors doing?

• Which media channels should we use?

The ZXM Social Media Framework

Social Media Engagement Strategy

• More than just the look and feel of website and email campaign

• More than just creating awareness and providing information

• Needed customers to move along the spectrum from awareness to produce desired behaviour and actions

Changing Consumers Behaviour

A D K A R

Awareness Desire Knowledge Action Reinforcement

• Awareness of need (pain point)

• Desire and motivation to participate

• Knowledge to make the change to satisfy needs

• Satisfy needs and participate

• Encouragement to keep the desired behaviour

engagement zone enablement zone

maintenance action preparation contemplation pre-contemplation

AWARENESS

A D K A R

Awareness

• Create an awareness in our target

audience about our activities

• Understand their pain points and how our

services will help to solve that problem

• The objective was to build a trust

relationship in order to move our audience

to the next stage of behavioural change

Understand your Audience

• Before we could decide on:

– What content to write

– What channels to use

– How to run our campaign

• We needed to know who we were targeting and what would grab their attention

Understanding our Target Audience

Government

Andy Smith Deputy Secretary Department of Media

AGE: 53 (Older baby boomer) GENDER: male ETHNICITY: Anglo-Saxon OCCUPATION: Public servant

“Technology moves too quickly”

Andy is a veteran public servant. He officially took up this role with the Department on 7 September 2009 and has been working to establish an understanding of the key policy issues, particularly with respect to convergence of technology, since that time.

Andy wants:

To get the right (sanitised) answer that he can provide to the Minster in the quickest possible time

Communication to be responsive

Communication to be convenient

Communication to be brief and straight to the point

To keep the Minister advised

Expertise Motivations Value of the ACMA Frustrations & Pain Points Public Service

Television Industry

Project management

Policy

Ministerial relations

Career advancement Negotiable Getting the ACMA to deliver

Slow response times

Political naivety

Being told “it can’t be done”

Source: Nielsen/NetRating 04-06. Forrester,2008/9. Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2008/9

Who

Demographics

Behavioural

stats

Pain-points Motivations Trusted

sources Values

How Do They Like to Be Engaged? Gen Y Gen X Boomers Seniors

Web 2.0 Behaviour

• Publish blog

• Create video/music

• Write articles or stories and post them

Creators 24%

• Update status on social networking sites

• Post updates on twitter Conversationalists 36%

• Post ranting/reviews of products and services

• Comment on someone else’s blog

• Contribute to online forums Critics 36%

• Use RSS feeds

• Votes for websites online

• Add tags to web pages or photos

Collectors 23%

• Maintain profile

• Visit social networking sites Joiners 68%

• Read blogs

• Listen to podcasts

• Read articles, reviews and online forums Spectators 73%

• None of the above In-actives 14%

Source: Forrester, 2008.

Behaviour and Age

Gen-Y Gen-X Boomer Senior

Creator 21% 13% 8% 5%

Critic 23% 16% 10% 7%

Collector 16% 10% 7% 5%

Joiner 37% 18% 10% 4%

Spectator 58% 45% 36% 26%

Do nothing 23% 48% 58% 70%

Source: Forrester, 2008.

Where are They Spending Time Online?

Channel Users in Feb 2012

1. Facebook 10, 703, 160

2. YouTube 11, 000, 000

3. Blogspot 3, 500, 000

4. LinkedIn 2, 200, 000

5. Twitter 1, 800, 000

6. Wordpress.com 1, 600, 000

7. Google Plus 1, 200, 000

8. Tumblr 1, 100, 000

9. Flickr 920, 000

10. MySpace 520, 000

Sensis Research 2010

What Channels to Use for Our Audience?

• Where are conversations about our types of services taking place

• Can these forums help us to build awareness?

• Is the channel just one-way?

• Does the channel support collaboration and discussion?

Channel and Age

Gen-Y Gen-X Boomer Senior

Facebook 99% 96% 97% 99%

Telephone 9% 30% 30% 27%

Face-to-face

21% 27% 24% 43%

LinkedIn 2% 14% 17% 14%

Twitter 8% 9% 4% 0%

Myspace 3% 5% 4% 0%

Paper 4% 8% 6% 13%

Sensis Research 2010

Choice of Channels?

Where to Focus?

• Old mantra of “be everywhere” replaced by need to

“be where it matters”

• Focus on where we could see results

DESIRE

A D K A R

Desire

• Awareness and Desire go hand-in-hand

• Build a relationship and nurture that relationship to change their behaviour to want to participate

• More effective if the customers are engaged and “like” what you are offering

Persuasion

• We wanted to persuade customers so we needed to speak to their pain points

• Grudge purchase so need to articulate “what’s in it for me?” and how our services could help them?

• Appeal to their personal needs and wants

Appeal to Our Customers

• “Too often business send the emails they want to send rather than the emails that their customers want to receive”

• Needed to understand our publishing strategy and where we wanted to go to appeal to our customers

Which Publishing Strategy?

The Mass Publisher • Create content of broad interest to their customers • Post articles on topics related to product or service and have copious links to product pages

The Problem Solver • Make consumers aware of a solution • Seek to help consumers in a market solve a problem • As these customers search for answers, find opportunities to engage and suggest where to find what they want

The Social Engager • Not just a vehicle for promotions and gathering followers, but a place to engage • Feed the channel - respond to customer posts, design experiences that encourage sharing to get others involved

The Personal Concierge • Personalised content to move customer through a decision journey from considering to evaluating, experiencing, advocating and, bonding • Build content guided by insights into customer behaviour (where have they come from, what are they looking at, what have others Like her bought)

This is where we were

Initial plan to move to here

Becoming a social organisation

May get there one day

KNOWLEDGE

A D K A R

Knowledge

• Education and building knowledge of our service and its value proposition

• Very Infocentric and wanted to move towards providing solutions

• Started by sharing content, providing useful and interesting information, and links

• Required good, unique and interesting content

Designing Content

• Limited time to spend on social media so Content and Relevance will drive Reputation, Relationships and Results

• Strategies involving marketing, social media, and SEO, will only work if you fuel them with good content

• If audience find what we have to say useful, they’ll be more inclined to subscribe/share

How to make marketing content Posted on October 21, 2011 by Luke Telford

Content is King

“If your campaigns aren't engaging, you can be sure that consumers have plenty of ideas on how to get rid of them”

Top Reasons Why Consumers Unsubscribe Via E-Mail, Facebook & Twitter - February 09, 2011 by Erica Swallow

Entertain, Engage and Educate

• Needed to ensure our audience derived some value out of their interactions with us

• Asked the question:

‘that’s really interesting for us , but how can we make it interesting to our target audience? What do they want to hear?”

• Add value don’t just promote service

Relevant Content is a Top Priority

Top Reasons Why Consumers Unsubscribe Via E-Mail, Facebook & Twitter - February 09, 2011 by Erica Swallow

Irrelevant Content will be Filtered Out

• ISPs consider graymail to be anything from newsletters to daily deals and social network updates • What might be “spam” to one person may be very important to another person

Delivery based on user engagement

Outlook Moving towards using behavior to determine whether an email will end up in your inbox or your junk folder :

• Message read, then deleted • Message deleted without reading it • Message answered • Frequency of receiving and reading of messages of a certain sender

Design Challenge - Portable inboxes

• People using social media “on the go” have very different behaviour from people sitting at a desktop • Level of activity, attention and amount of time shortens considerably - direct impact on mobile content

Responsive Design

Mobile App changed to

responsive design (CSS3, HTML5)

ACTION

A D K A R

Action

• Effective message design will help get customers to your website

• Leverage that momentum to turn them into customers

• Once we had customers engaged and they liked what they saw, then we were more likely to get them to act

How to turn “Likes” into “Lovers”

• This step is all about taking advantage of the engaged state our “Likers” are in

• If they liked our page, they are far more likely to perform another type of action

How to turn your Facebook “Likes” into Sales December 1st, 2011 by Verity Meagher

Be Clear about How to Participate

• Be clear about what you are asking them to do, what you are offering and how they can engage

• Get them to sign up to your newsletter, subscribe to our blog and tell their friends about us and become fans

Be Clear and Make it Easy to Act

Follow Us

Share

This

Calculate what

it will cost you

Sign

Petition

Register

Subscribe

Result – over 130,000 signed our petition

Encourage Sharing of Content

• The higher social engagement, the more likely followers will share your content and help build awareness of your service

• Make it easy for them to share – integrating social media sharing tools such as Facebook Like, Google +1, and Tweet badges on our website to increase content sharing.

Integrated Our Social Media

How to Measure Actions?

• What are we measuring?

• Why are we measuring it?

• Did we know what the measure means?

• How can we influence the outcome (subscribe or unsubscribe, up or down)?

52

Simple BI Mechanisms

Channel Behaviour Outcome Important for what

segment

Measurable?

Facebook /

Twitter

Joiner, Critic

(Likes)

People are

listening

• Primary

• Secondary

• Yes

Twitter / G+ Critic (Retweets/

shares)

People trust the

information and

feel it worthy

enough for

others to know

about

• Secondary

• Tertiary

• Yes

Blogs Creator, Critic People feel the

information is

worth discussing

• Secondary

• Tertiary

• Yes

Email Joiner,

Spectator,

Collector

The information

is worth keeping

• Secondary

• Tertiary

• Yes*

Paper Collector,

Shares

The information

is worth keeping

& giving to

others

• Secondary

• Tertiary

• No

*If the email newsletter has Campaign Monitor-like functionality

Ways to Measure Campaign Activity

Understanding the Analytics

• Don't expect to be getting 80% open rates • 20% to 40% is about average

How to Increase Open Rates

• Experiment with subject lines • Send on a different day • Get the important content up the top (they will preview before deciding to open it or ignore it) • Make sure your email is recognizable (want to be a trusted source of useful content)

Monitored our “Unsubscribed” rates

• Industry norm is <2% unsubscribe rate • The exception is when you send to new lists (tend to generate higher unsubscribe rate)

Site Analytics – Prior to Digital Strategy

1 Jan to 30 Dec 2010

• 4535 people visited our site

• 8,597 page views

• 3.1 average pages viewed

• Time on site 1.21 mins

Site Analytics – Post Implementation

3 x more visitors and page views in 1 month than what was achieved over

12 months

First Month – soft launch “skinny solution”

Second Month – fully integrated campaign

REINFORCEMENT

A D K A R

Reinforcement

• A good experience will ensure they:

– Engage again

– Share their experience with others

– Which will in-turn increase their likelihood of

engaging as well

• As well as ensuring the interaction is a

positive one, need to satisfy their desires

and/or address their pain point

Reinforcement

• Let customers know the benefits of their

action to reinforce their behaviour

• Keep the two-way conversation going

• Moving to collaboration rather than just

pushing out info of interest

• Social Engager vs Mass publisher

Summary

A D K A R

Awareness Desire Knowledge Action Reinforcement

• Content delivered

into search engine

results thru SEO

strategy

• Brand consistency

• Word-of-mouth via

physical and

virtual

mechanisms

enabled thru social

media

• Communicate

capability to deliver

Wants

• Speak w/

consistent &

appropriate voice

• Low-barrier to

participation

• Potential to deliver

on power

motivators

• Enable

identification with

brand and Authors

• Assure knowledge

of delivery thru

channels of

preference

• Knowledge that

action will result in

removal of pain-

points

• Deliver on wants

• Deliver on Needs

• Satisfy ‘Desire’

• Good user-experience –

virtual or physical

regardless

of channel

• Capability to share with

community thru physical

or

virtual social mechanisms

maintenance action preparation contemplation pre-contemplation

• Provide value - Interesting and Relevant content

• Be consistent - Have the same look and feel so all you need to do is drop in the content. Makes it easy for you and reader

• Include links – Link to longer articles on your website and track what readers are clicking

• Be personal - Drop in the reader’s first name

• Target - Identify segments to make it relevant and effective

• Include call to action - Be clear in what you want your readers to do. Make it easy to sign up or participate

• Be concise - Put important things at the top, include summary with links, keep it short and sweet

Source: E-Newsletter Do’s and Don’ts December 16th, 2011 by Clancy Clarke

Do’s

Designing for Conversions Do’s & Don’ts

• Get carried away with animation - Visual elements need to support image and make navigation to key message easier

• Too much flash – Inhibits loading times and formatting for accessing internet on the move

• Send too often- Plan out what you want to highlight and when. Don’t clutter inboxes. Send a newsletter rather than ad hoc emails

• Forget to proof it first - Nothing turns off readers more than mistakes. Check spelling, grammar and offers

• Send without an unsubscribe- If readers are no longer interested in your content, it is best to let them unsubscribe quickly and easily

Source: E-Newsletter Do’s and Don’ts December 16th, 2011 by Clancy Clarke

Designing for Conversions Do’s & Don’ts

Don’ts

Thank you

@miahorri

zenexmachina.wordpress.com

Mia Horrigan

Mia Horrigan

http://www.slideshare.net/miahorri

Mia.Horrigan@zenexmachina.com