One of the best ways to stay in touch with your customer base is with email. An effective email campaign is designed to reach out to your customers in a timely and effective manner. Both the timing and the content of an email campaign can make a big difference in whether your customers actually read your email or whether they simply click Delete.
One of my clients is a hotel on the Oregon Coast. We use targeted email to announce special pricing for lodging at the hotel. To make the email enticing enough for people to read, we include other information of interest about activities going on nearby. Things such as dining, festivals, hiking, and other beach activities are typical stories. We try to include a balance of pictures and text to make the email aesthetically pleasing as well as interesting and informative to the reader. Click here to view a sample email created for this client.
When developing an email campaign, it is essential that the email only be sent to subscribers who have opted-in to receive the email. There are many service providers who manage email lists and help ensure your email isn’t treated as spam. More about this in another post.
There are many ways to communicate information. Many times, a picture is worth a thousand words. And sometimes an animation is worth even more. Whether you’re teaching a new user how to use your application or convincing a potential customer why they should buy your product, a video animation is often the easiest way to get your point across.
Consider the simple task of creating a blog post (such as this one) in a Wordpress blog. It would take several paragraphs of fairly un-interesting text to spell out the basic steps involved. After reading the steps, you may or may not have a clear picture in your mind of how to perform the task. By conveying the information in an animated tutorial, there’s no second-guessing involved. You see and hear exactly what the steps are. This sample video animation demonstrates the task of creating a blog post in less than a minute.
Video animations are often referred to as “eLearning.” eLearning is by no means the only way to communicate step-by-step instructions. But many times it’s the most effective.
Before writing any type of technical documentation, whether it’s a short piece of web content or an extensive knowledge system for a complex software product, you need to know who you’re writing to. This goes by many names, such as audience analysis, customer analysis, or user profile. Having an understanding of your audience impacts your writing style, voice, and the method of communication. These are a few things to consider when doing an audience analysis: Continue reading ‘Know Your Audience’
