• by Larry Dobrow , December 14, 2003

In a refreshing antidote to the glut of research focusing on website effectiveness and spam, the Nielsen Norman Group's tech wonks decided to take a look at how consumers perceive confirmation messages and other transactional email. The results of the firm's study, however, revealed that many of these missives are missing their mark, thus putting companies and organizations at risk of alienating their customers.

Some of the conclusions reached in "Usability of Confirmation Email and Transactional Messages" are obvious. It's no secret, for instance, that most users enter email communications with a skeptical attitude, or that a well-designed email that gets right to the point reflects favorably on its sender. More surprising are the study's findings about the clarity and frequency of customer-service emails, which seem to have become more of a hindrance than a help to recipients.

"I think 'stressed' is the only appropriate word for how people feel about email," says Nielsen Norman co-founder Jakob Nielsen. "In this very, very polluted environment, they're being bombarded, and the [confirmation/transactional] messages may be making things worse."

For the study, Nielsen Norman researchers observed and questioned subjects as they looked at a full e-mailbox and decided whether or not each message was worth opening, described their decision-making process, and commented on each message. The subjects were broken down evenly between men and women with a range of Internet experience, with the only qualifier being that participants had to have shopped and bought something via the Web at least once. The messages themselves were a mix of order, service, and status notifications.

The major problem with confirmation and other transactional messages seems to be that many of them less closely resemble a customer-service step in a transaction than spam, with sending addresses that appear computer-generated and obscure subject lines. "You might think that how a computer sends automated emails is a matter of programming and that the content is what matters, but this isn't the case," Nielsen notes. "Users won't get to the content unless they have a better idea of who's sending the email and what it's about."

As for subject lines, Nielsen was surprised to see that even big-name marketers are still using vague, spammish headers. "We saw one that said 'important information,'" he says in amazement. "That might have worked ten years ago, but nowadays you have to be more concrete. Customers want to read 'about your airline reservation going to New York,' or something just as specific."

The specificity issues also extend to the body of the message. Nielsen believes that companies sending messages often bury what the consumer wants to see (a tracking number, a detailed invoice, etc.) behind an amalgam of offers and similar detritus. "And yet [these companies] still wonder why consumers don't make it to the end of the message," Nielsen snorts. Consumers respond most favorably, he says, to those transactional emails that are short and succinct.

And they shouldn't be sent as often as many companies seem to think. In the early days of Web shopping, the sequential updates - "we received your order," "your item is in stock," "we're shipping your order," "your order has been shipped" - may have calmed consumers' fears about shopping via a new medium. But now, with nearly every Internet user comfortable with online shopping, this unrelenting torrent of email tends to aggravate rather than affirm.

"It's probably impossible to do everything in one message, but companies should try to limit it to two," Nielsen advises. "You always want to send an immediate order confirmation - that makes the transaction real for the consumer, as opposed to just seeing it on the Internet. After that, hold off until you ship the order."