Request Marketing
by Jakob Nielsen
Seth Godin deserves much praise for his book, Permission Marketing: it was a landmark publication that established opt-in as the only strategy for an ethical website.
Permission marketing does not go far enough, however. It is still based on the notion that marketing is the transmission of messages from the business to the consumer. This same unidirectional metaphor is also implied by the infamous acronym B2C. An ethical company will only send people stuff if they have indicated some willingness to receive it. Fine, but we are still talking one-way.
The Web works in the opposite direction of permission marketing: from the user to the website. It is the ultimate customer-driven medium: he or she who clicks the mouse controls everything. It is time to recognize this fact and embed it in Internet marketing strategy.
Request marketing basically means that the customers are designated the task of asking the company for what they want. You can't get more targeted than that. You can't get any hotter leads. And from a usability perspective, you will get a design that works with the fundamental principles of the Web and not against them.
Example: One-Time Notification Email
As in so many other areas of the Web, Amazon.com has been a pioneer in request marketing. The best feature of the entire site is the one where a customer can ask to be sent email every time his or her favorite author publishes a new book. This feature has been on Amazon for three to four years, and I still get occasional email about authors I told them about in 1997. Sure enough, when my favorite author publishes a new book, I am quite likely to buy it. More important, it feels like customer service to be told about the new book. Not spam. Not advertising. Not even a permission marketing style newsletter. Pure helpful service. Something I requested.
Amazon is good: they have extended the same feature to sell loads of DVDs. Amazon now list films while they are playing in the movie theaters and you can sign up to get email when a film comes out on DVD in two or three years.
I have my own modest version of this feature: we are currently running a field study in London of WAP usability and WAP content. This study has generated substantial interest based on the preliminary findings which I have mentioned at a few conferences, but the final report is not ready yet (the last data is still being collected). Well, I am not too proud to learn from Amazon, so I added a feature to the project page where users can sign up to get email when the report is published.
Whether it's Amazon telling you about a DVD or me telling you about my WAP report, a key point is that the email addresses collected by the site must only be used once. They should be used to send out the one message the user requested and nothing more. Sounds like a great loss of marketing opportunity for sending additional messages. But the users didn't ask for messages, they asked to be notified about something very specific they care about.
It's fine to also offer a newsletter (or a column like the very text you are reading now), but that should be kept separate from request marketing. For a by-request-service, you only send customers what they explicitly asked for.
Unfortunately current mailing list services offer poor support for conducting request marketing through email. They are all designed to treat mailing lists as a Big Deal and not as disposable, ephemeral services. The overhead of establishing and administering a mailing list is acceptable for something like the Alertbox notifications where people hopefully stay subscribed for years and which can grow to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The same overhead doesn't work at all for a one-time mailing to a few hundred people.
The best solution for ephemeral mailing lists I have found so far is ListBot. It only costs $99 per year and allows you to establish unlimited mailing lists. It is reasonably easy to set up a new list and it is very easy to delete the list after its one use. Unfortunately, it is unpleasantly hard for users to indicate their interests in these small lists. ListBot has an entire big bureaucracy of passwords and other features that make sense for big discussion groups but not for adding your name to a one-time mailing.
Types of Request Marketing
Request marketing does not have to be conducted by email. Email is currently the best technology for contacting a user, but it is ultimately doomed to failure as people drown in overflowing inboxes.
We need to develop new mechanisms for allowing people to get the information they have requested without putting it all into the inbox. Here are some approaches, some of which work today. Others will require new technology.
Including a special entry on the home page of the website itself. If the user is a frequent visitor, then you can just turn on a notification on the home page when the event has happened. For example, if the user has ordered a backordered product, then there could be an area on the home page that kept track of the order status and notified the user when the order was getting ready to ship.
Showing the information on another site.
Third-party websites could keep track of things users have requested to be told about and would list the relevant information on a customized page for each user.
The information control panel would be a new application to run on the user's computer. It would monitor the activity in different areas of the Internet: for example, it could indicate that there was a hot discussion topic in a newsgroup that the user had requested to be monitored. The control panel could also receive request marketing updates from any Internet services which the user had allowed access to his or her control panel. If the control panel had some amount of judgment, it could prioritize these updates based on their likely interest to the user.
Email. Very intrusive, but still good for some purposes. Also, while we are waiting for the control panel, we need a "push" mechanism that does not require the user to go somewhere.
Mobile notifications. Users could be paged or other types of alerts could appear on their mobile Internet device. This is the most intrusive mechanism of all, and should thus be reserved for cases where users are desperate to know as soon as something happens.
Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is principal of Nielsen Norman Group, a user
experience company. His latest book, Designing
Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity currently has a quarter million
copies in print in 11 languages.
Dr. Nielsen's bi-weekly Alertbox column on Web usability has been
published on the Internet since 1995 and currently has about 200,000
readers.
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