Communications

Definitions

Empathy
The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Click rate
(No. of clicks) / (No. of emails sent - No. of emails bounced)
Open rate
(No. of unique opens) / (No. of emails sent - No. of emails bounced)

Goals

Communicate value, not features
Respond quickly and transparently in crises
Earn user attention, don't demand it

Questions to Ask

What's the key message? What's the desired headline (8 words or fewer) we want to create?

Like with general communication plans and campaigns, start with the end in mind and be clear what you're trying to convey.

How will life be better if the customer gets their hands on our product?

Sell the value to the user, not the product. Like what every textbook tries to teach, Steve Jobs sold the value of having 1,000 songs in your pocket, not 8GB of hard disk space on the iPod.

What's our crisis communications plan?

In a crisis you'd want to quickly communicate. To do so, you'll need a plan, you want to put out reliable information, and you want people to trust that you know your shit.

What are our metrics for our communication campaigns/efforts?

If it's not measurable, it doesn't exist!

How are allocating and differentiating our relationship building and revenue-generating communications?

Different communication objectives need different strategies. Sometimes we want to tell stories, build a brand. Other times we want to convert and close sales.

What are the user personas we're targeting?

Ought to be aligned with personas from UX research and product strategy, but might sometimes differ.

How do we use Android/iOS notifications, dialogs, and which screens?

Notifications and messages are essential to communications. Chances are they won't read your emails, but more likely they will read notifications. Then again, you wouldn't want that annoying high-pitched "shopee!" sound.

Alarm Bells

We're doing our best. Users need to understand that downtime and errors happen sometimes.

Too often system owners think they're beyond reproach and as long as they tried their best, users need to accept whatever that happens. The least you can do is not to sound like that.

Our comms should focus on telling users what we're doing and what they need to do next.

Focus should always be on the user or customer getting value. How will life be better if the customer gets their hands on our product?

We'll get the announcement out when we're ready - we need to review it properly first.

You want to prevent speculation, users getting confused, news getting out where you can't control the narrative, and damage to your brand, reputation, or operations.

Giving too little detail.

We had an incident. It's been resolved. It's not in our interest to give more details.

Too much jargon!

It's easy to slip into spamming technical terms and jargon. Few would take the time to read those. Yet fewer would understand and appreciate it.

The Director approved 10 push notifications for the campaign... we understand the concern about spamming, but these were approved.

Just because you can (or were approved to) contact the user, doesn't mean you should. Burning user goodwill and attention span for internal KPIs creates 'notification blindness' for when you actually need to reach them.

You need to follow our instructions exactly as stated. We know what's best for your situation.

Condescending or arrogant communication destroys trust and creates user resentment. Users need to feel respected, not lectured.

We have 10 important announcements this week that users need to know about.

Our message won't get through if we need it to.

Apptitude / Curated by Zixian Chen

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