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Getting the (e)mail throughHas it ever struck you that the Internet's two main applications have evolved at markedly different rates? In four years, the Web has transformed itself from Model T Ford to air-conditioned Commodore. Meanwhile, electronic mail remains much as it ever was. Call it up, type, address, send. The Web's giddying, often overhyped technological rise - Shockwave, Java, push, streaming video and the rest - has captured it most of the Internet attention. But e-mail remains the more widely used of the two activities: according to a recent Intelliquest survey, 87 per cent of Net users employ e-mail, against 83 per cent who use the Web. You can also argue e-mail is the more serious, work-oriented tool: we BROWSE the Web, but we CHECK and READ our e-mail. E-mail can be built straight into Web pages. Instead of getting a new page, the visitor who clicks an e-mail link simply gets a new pre-addressed message using her e-mail software. If the Web is to be truly interactive, as most of the countless Web visionaries insist it must, then e-mail links should surely play an important part in that interactivity. Strange, then, that Web designers pay e-mail so little heed. In the slew of Web design books that has come my way in the past year, not one has made a serious exploration of techniques for promoting e-mail interactivity. If you've seen a Web site that addresses the question, I'd love to hear from you right away. In case you didn't notice, that was an e-mail link. E-mail for all seasonsEvery page should allow visitors to e-mail the site designer, if only to tell him that some page element doesn't work; at this site, visitors have helped me solve problems, cut out bad links and correct spelling. (One obvious goof remains, to be fixed in a site redesign; see if you can spot it.) But if you want to generate real reactions, you'll need more than that. Most pages settle for an e-mail link on their standard navigation bar. But perhaps you want to encourage even more responses. How? If you can't find the answer, make a big, fat guess. When I built the www.telstrashares.com site for Fairfax recently to coincide with the Telstra float, I wanted e-mails. I wanted to tap visitors thoughts about the Telstra privatisation, their opinion of the company's future and their uncertainties about the share-buying process. So I added not only the standard e-mail links but also a couple of big, loud buttons next to every article about the Telstra float. "Got a view? RESPOND" shouted one. The other asked readers to e-mail questions to The Age's highly-rated business columnist, Stephen Bartholomeusz. These buttons linked to a page which took visitors through the message-posting process, and which warned them to indicate if they didn't want their e-mail address posted on the site. E-mail me now! I insist! Please! Click this heading!I can't tell whether this typographic hard sell has worked. Linked from other Age and Sydney Morning Herald sites, and with over a million people buying Telstra shares, telstrashares.com has racked up plenty of hits. So it's not surprising that it's received dozens of e-mail messages. But it has certainly taught some interesting lessons. First of all - and with apologies to Nicholas, Esther and the other massed interactivity gurus - few people want simply to communicate their ideas, even on a site with lots of traffic. Of tens of thousands of visitors from more than 50 countries, less than a dozen posted views to telstrashares.com. Instead, most made extremely intelligent and specific requests for information. Stephen Bartholomeusz suddenly found himself answering an electronic pile of mail, and generating a heap of material for the site. Which leads to another lesson: if people do react to your site, you need to be ready to deal with them. Luckily for telstrashares.com, Stephen's interest in the Web's potential sustained him through thousands of words of work until Telstra listed. Not everyone roped in to a Web project will be willing to work as hard. And just processing several e-mails a day and adding them to the site quickly became a burden. (I made it harder than it should have been by moving to new e-mail software in the middle of the process, losing several pieces of mail in the process). Telstrashares.com gives Fairfax a chance to show off its financial expertise on-line, while building links with existing and potential customers. Most companies will view e-mail the same way: as a chance to provide fast, efficient customer service. If you're designing Web pages, there's a good chance that generating e-mail response should be among your top priorities. So how do you generate e-mail response? E-mail me now with your ideas. Go on, do it. I'd really appreciate the feedback.
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The telstrashares.com site