I recently sent out a few emails – about a thousand – to tell clients a few details about a program to which they participate.
Imagine my surprise when I started getting calls and emails saying the program website (which I had just checked) was not working. A few minutes sufficed to find the problem:
People were confusing email addresses with web addresses. Ouch!
This hurt, and at first I was a little put out. After all, who doesn’t know that name@domain.com is not a web address?
Apparently, my clients.
If wisdom is what you get when you screw up, I’ve gained a little bit today. Test, test, test, test. And when you’ve done, test again. At least run your messages past a few complete technophobes. And adjust based on the result.
Why?
It’s not my customers that are stupid. Unless I think that buying from me is a bad decision!
[tags] usability, email, marketing, messages, test, testing, communication, john koetsier [/tags]
Your post is interesting in that it points out a problem that is more common than people think. No, it’s not the actually problem you experienced of your customers mistaking email addresses for URLs. The problem I’m talking about is that many entrepreneurs and small business owners take it for granted that their customers have a certain knowledge base. From your experience here it’s clear that we should always make our instructions even more detailed than we think they need to be…