Have you ever felt that you're a different person at work than the one you are at home? No - I'm not talking about the fact that you might turn into a tyrant the moment you're at your desk when you're actually a pussycat at home (although that's certainly true of some of the people I've worked with in previous lives). What I mean is that I've noticed that the decisions marketers make about how to communicate to their customers get divorced from their own personal consumer experiences.

In all the hurly-burly that comes with simply getting through the workload, we (and I absolutely include myself here) seem to forget that we’re actually real people and that it’s quite likely that all the frustrations we experience in our own interactions with companies are also being experienced by our customers when they interact with our organisations.

The good news is that this is nothing new - in fact, the discipline called “user experience” (or usability) is designed to address this issue, and I believe there’s loads we can learn from it in email marketing too.

There are two interlocking principles to UX (as it’s trendily known these days):

• always approach your process (whether be it a Web site, email software, or a piece of hardware) through the eyes of your users - and wherever possible ask those users to help you;
• use the current conventions wherever you can.

What you’re aiming to do is to make it as easy for your customers to achieve what they set out to do, and to enhance their the user experience of interacting with your organisation. This was elegantly summarised in the superb book by Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, and I’d thoroughly recommend reading it to re-energise your thinking about the world of online marketing.

There are two ways to do this in practice. The first is to ask some users - or potential users - to talk to you. Ask them to complete a variety of tasks - sign up to your list, unsubscribe from an email, change their preferences and so on - and ask them to talk through what they’re thinking at each point. You’ll probably find you can learn a great deal from even a handful of interviews, and users are often very happy to share their views - particularly if you can reward them with some gift vouchers or a bottle of something nice.

But even if it’s not possible to organise to speak to users, it’s always worth setting aside some time to take your work hat off, turn yourself back into a ‘real’ customer, and run through the processes yourself. If you ask yourself some hard questions - are the fields in any form exactly where you expect to see them, and can you easily find how to update your email preferences - you will be quite likely to spot something that needs to be tweaked. And often this kind of tweak can be done very easily, without a huge amount of development input. Have a look too at the words you use. Are fields or buttons described in terms that are only actually meaningful to someone familiar with your own internal systems?

The final point to bear in mind is that conventions change very quickly online and, given that a major tenet of UX is that you obey convention wherever possible, the only way to keep up with things is to make sure you’re using the Web and email yourself as often as possible. This sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s often hard to make time to deliberately sign up to get email from similar organisations to our own.

More to the point, it’s always good to be on the lookout for good ideas to steal borrow. Obviously ripping off the complete look and feel of a page is going to land you in trouble, but there’s no reason why you can’t take a small idea - i.e. a good description for a field, or a great subject line for a confirmation email - and make use of it.

If we learn from what we see in our daily lives, and make use of it when we get into work, then we’re actually improving customer experience - and hopefully making the Web a better place for everyone. That’s an objective to bring out the ‘real’ person in us all!

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About the Author

Kieran Cooper is senior manager of support services for Lyris' international operations. Located in the Lyris Inc. UK office, he is responsible for account management, implementation and support.

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