One of my favorite examples of bad email marketing (for which many of my coworkers will vouch) is Banana Republic’s practice of sending me lots and lots of emails promoting women’s clothing. Let me make one think perfectly clear: I do not buy women’s clothing from Banana Republic. I do buy a lot of my clothes from them (like, nearly everything – it’s Garanimals for grown-ups), but never have I bought a skirt, pumps, or a handbag. Trust me on this. I even use their Luxe card because I’m a points whore and like to get free stuff, so you’d think they’d have a really good idea of not only what I’ve bought, but also my favorite colors, waist size, and whether or not I buy on sale. But no, they’ve never seemed inclined to do anything with that.
Until today. This morning, I see that not only does my latest BR email have the word “pants” in the subject line (without the word “suit” immediately following it), but it also contains men’s clothing and actual personalized content. It recognizes me as a Luxe card holder and tells me how many points I have and how many more I need before they send me $25. Nice. This is a step in the right direction. Now, if only the info wasn’t a month out of date…
Fifteen web principles from the British Broadcasting Corporation:
1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)
2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)
3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.
4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.
5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.
6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.
7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.
8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.
9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.
10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.
11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.
12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users
13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site
14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale
15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.
Brilliant.
David Pogue relates the following tidbit from the private audience he and John Markoff had with Steve Jobs and the iPhone shortly after its introduction:
Markoff: “What about all those plugins that live within Safari now, like Flash or like Java or like JavaScript?”
Jobs: “Well, you might see [Flash].”
Markoff: “What about YouTube?”
Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”
Steve thinks you don’t need Flash to watch a YouTube video? What does “all you need to do is deal with YouTube” mean, exactly? YouTube, like a awful lot of sites today, delivers video from within a player built in Flash. We do that, among other reasons, so we don’t need to mess around with crap like Window Media. If Stevie J. wants those of us compelled to buy an iPhone for reasons we can’t easily explain to be able to view YouTube videos, then it’d had better support Flash.
Honestly, as far as I’m concerned, any web-browsing device that doesn’t support Flash just ain’t worth it. Even Opera’s Wii browser supports Flash (and can “deal with YouTube”). Come on, Steve. Snap out of it.