The power of microcopy.
Making promises & reducing friction using tiny words.
10x newsletter signups | Growth Design | Content Strategy
The team: Content Designer (me); UI Designer; Front-End Developer
HR Assured produced a monthly workplace relations newsletter that went out via email to clients and people who subscribed on the website.
Signups from the website were low, and the newsletter at the time was heavily focused on marketing rather than useful information, and even existing clients were unsubscribing.
Time for a redesign
As part of designing the UX and writing the copy for HR Assured’s complete website redesign, I wanted to create a signup to the company newsletter that would increase conversions.
I also realised I would need to create a content strategy for the newsletters to align with the new messaging.
The challenge
The original signup field looked like this:
I identified many opportunities for improvement:
The voice & tone are overly formal.
There are no statements of value to give the user a reason to sign up.
Nothing there allays user fears of being spammed with marketing emails, or whether they can unsubscribe.
Overall, there’s significant friction (as proved by the data at the time).
It’s unclear what the user gets – informed with the latest what?
Using ‘please’ in this context looks a little ‘beggy’ (a word I made up to describe not-quite-but-almost-pleading language).
There’s no indication of what happens next.
Ambiguous grammar – ‘please enter your email’ — does the user go and enter (i.e. open) their email inbox? The statement is also (in a beggy way) asking the user to perform an action, not simply indicating where to write their email address.
And I didn’t get the “Go”? Where are we going? Does it mean “Go for it” or “Go on” or “Go away”?
The solution
Copy placement was critical, so I sketched the design for the UI Designer and Developer. The result…
Voice & Tone to match the V&T guide I wrote for the project – friendly, conversational, informal, clear, and direct. To reduce friction and be transparent with our users, I tell the user what they’re going to get if they subscribe, how they’re going to get it and how often. It’s a clear statement of value and reassurance.
In line with the new content strategy (see below) I was specific about what types of content we’d send.
I avoided any reference to ‘newsletter’, as a survey I conducted with a cross- section of our clients found most respondents thought ‘newsletter’ sounded boring but ‘articles and updates’ sounded more interesting.
I made the address field microcopy clear and brief. It’s also a label now, vs. the original’s instruction.
To reduce friction, I tried to find a way to say ‘it’s good stuff and not spam’, opting for percentages to catch the eye and say it in a way that would grab attention.
I needed to further reduce friction by reassuring the user that there’s a way out: they can unsubscribe at any time.
The ‘once or twice a month’ wording was deliberately chosen to make the tone more casual and give us more flexibility in the frequency of emails each month (a second email if we need it), without making a big deal out of it.
Overall, much nicer visual design and a softer, more welcoming colour palette.
The result
The new signup field increased weekly conversions by 10x going forward.
Along with improved content strategy and quality in what we were sending subscribers, the unsubscribe rate dropped to low single digits, opening rates increased by 2.5x, and we received a lot of positive feedback from clients on the improved readability and article quality.
The supporting content strategy – content must match the promise
As part of the push for more subscribers to our content as part of a new content marketing strategy:
Monthly ‘newsletters’ were dropped and replaced by summaries and links to useful articles on our blog, helpful eBooks and guides we produced in-house, and updates about changes in employment law that might affect subscribers. Yes, sounds like a newsletter, but we presented the info in a different format with different messaging, so it no longer felt like one.
All sales and marketing messaging was banned from these emails. Period. If someone wrote anything in the email with wording that was even slightly ‘salesy’, it was rewritten. We adopted a pure content marketing strategy which was all about giving value to the subscriber.
Ethics and advocating for the user
I firmly believe that when one makes a promise to a user, one must deliver on that promise without exception or compromise. It takes one broken promise to tarnish the image of your company with a user.
On several occasions after the new site launched, I had to fight for the promise we made to our subscribers – no more than two emails a month. Marketing would sometimes get excited and want to send ‘just another email’ to the list that month, after they’d already sent two emails.
Pushing back…
I found data to support my case that breaching the written promise we made to users at signup would damage our brand and cost us users, and I created a presentation for leadership on how trust is built through content marketing.
I proposed a solution to sending extra emails: improve the planning of content releases, and combine any extra content into the two-per-month emails to keep the promise we made at signup.
To keep these, now longer, emails focused and scannable, I suggested changes to the article summaries and format of the emails, which reduced the wordcount and improved readability, making the newsletter emails appear shorter.
