Many brands have started utilizing social media to understand customer issues and complaints. Most of their audiences are active on social media channels. This gives them direct access to customer insights and requirements. Brands can also reinforce their branding efforts by bringing in customer support services through social outlets.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are some of the most popular social media platforms. These platforms are mostly used to promote the brand and its offerings. You can also use them to resolve customer issues. One of the most popular means of doing this is responding directly to customer comments and posts.
What is social listening?
Social media listening platform means understanding customer issues and feedback through social media. Brands track customer feedback and opinions to improve their products or services.
The customer conversations give them insights into customer behavior and buying patterns. It also helps them get a clear idea of their angst, frustration, or issues. Social listening can also be used to keep a close eye on the evolving requirements of end users.
Here are some ways of improving customer service through social listening:
1. Recognize the most popular social platforms
Before using social listening to resolve customer queries/complaints, recognize the social platforms on which most of your customers gather.
If you run a B2B type of business, most of your clients may be active on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Instagram is the best place to address customer issues related to shopping brands.
Finding the right content distribution will help you track industry-specific brands, customers, competitors, etc.
Suppose that you sell SaaS products. In this case, most of your customers may be active on LinkedIn.
In this case, choose LinkedIn as your content distribution platform.
Set alerts or notifications on these social media platforms so that you don’t miss out on important conversations. The alerts or notifications will also help you prioritize customer queries or complaints. Different social platforms have different ways of doing this.
For instance, you can use the communications tab to set up notifications on LinkedIn.
Focus on popular social platforms to bring in customer engagement. It will help you build long-lasting relationships with your customers, which will ultimately boost your business. Be active on these social platforms to improve your customer response rate.
2. Use social listening tools
Tracking customer conversations via several social media platforms can be a challenging and time-consuming task. Social listening tools can help automate some of these tasks.
Social listening tools help you keep a close eye on customer conversations. These tools use brand mentions, tags, and keywords to track these conversations. You can also create a search query to fetch customer conversations without any issues.
Smart use of social listening tools prevents you from missing out on a single customer conversation. These tools not only save you time but also enable you to send prompt responses to customer queries and complaints.
You can also latch on to a comprehensive customer management suite like Konnect Insights.
It helps you understand what customers are saying about your brand and products.
Also, it helps you track customer conversations and analyze them automatically. Based on the insights obtained through this social listening platform, you can make data-driven decisions.
Konnect Insights is one of the best platforms that allows you to manage customer experiences. You can listen to their conversations and respond to them immediately using its tools and features. It is possible to integrate this platform with several apps that can help you manage customer data.
The wide range of tools offered on this platform helps you enhance customer relationships. You can conduct surveys and evaluate customer feedback through these tools. It also comes with crisis management capabilities. With these capabilities, you can pre-empt a crisis and take prompt action to resolve it.
3. Listen to what customers are saying through forums and communities
Social media is not limited to social media accounts and pages. Countless forums and communities are active on social media. The audience uses these communities and forums to discuss their issues. They also use these social outlets to connect with like-minded people. You can target those communities that contain your target audiences.
For example, if you manufacture gaming phones and devices, you can focus on gaming communities and forums.
The communities like Quora and Reddit can also help you to discuss customer issues and complaints in detail.
These communities will provide you with in-depth insights into customer issues or pain points. By analyzing their pain points, you can make significant changes to your product and customer service.
Leaving open threads on social media can leave your customers frustrated. Address customer issues through these threads. It will also help customers who are facing similar issues. It will help improve your customer service, which will in turn allow you to maintain customer loyalty.
4. Convert frustrated users to loyal customers
Listening to customer issues and complaints is just one part of the process. Many more efforts are required to provide a satisfactory experience for your customers.
You can start by acknowledging the customer’s issues and apologizing for them.
Next, you must provide more clarity to the customers by discussing with them in private. If possible you can explain to them over a phone call or meet them in person. Faster response time makes customers feel like you understand their concerns.
Make customers feel like you care for them. Small things like sending them an apology letter or giving them extra loyalty points for being patient can help your brand go a long way. Once you have resolved the issues or complaints of the customers, you can ask them to subscribe to the newsletters.
Create email newsletters that focus on discussing the product features in detail. Also, keep the customers in the loop about your latest offerings through these newsletters.
Addressing customer complaints is not enough. You must also acknowledge positive reviews and feedback. A simple thank you can be enough on most occasions.
Social listening tools will ensure that you respond quickly to the appreciation notes of your customers. It will make your customers think that you feel good when they appreciate your offerings. Tiny efforts like these will strengthen your customer relationships.
5. Analyze the customer service problems faced by your competitor’s customers
Social listening helps you analyze the strengths and shortcomings of your competitors. By using insightful social media tools, you can recognize the concerns that your competitors’ customers are facing. Using this, you can revamp your customer service strategies.
Suppose that some of your competitor’s customers are not happy with the limited customer service options they offer. You can capitalize on this shortcoming and try to lure them in by offering more options.
For instance, you can offer customer support services through chat, email, telephone, etc. Keep your customers satisfied by providing them with more options to connect with your support executives.
It will not only give you a competitive edge but also help you expand your customer reach.
Tips to improve customer service using social listening
These are some additional tips that can help you improve your customer service:
1. Be proactive
Be proactive while addressing customer concerns and complaints via social media.
By being proactive, you can notify a customer even before they have encountered a problem.
Suppose that you sell software solutions and that your software is scheduled for maintenance activity due to a recent update. Now, it is better to inform all your customers in advance than respond to their complaints afterward. It will create a good impression on your customers.
2. Merge content marketing apps with social listening tools
The social listening tools help you track customer conversations in real-time.
By merging content marketing apps with social listening tools, you can manage customer interactions.
Handling the customers in real-time can also help you avert a crisis. Choose social listening tools that are backed by powerful algorithms. You should be able to enter search queries, keywords, and brand names to monitor conversations. These tools should also be integrated with content management apps to offer seamless customer service.
3. Discover brand influencers
Discovering the influencers who have the maximum impact on your customers can also improve your customer service. You can track how these influencers deal with and manage end users. Adopt some of their strategies to make your customer service more impactful.
Influencers usually have knowledge of re-targeting groups based on their conversations. By using their insights, you can construct formidable marketing campaigns. Some of these insights can also be used to retain customers.
Train your customer support executives to cross-sell your offerings. Suppose that a customer who uses your software is suffering an issue due to poor security measures. Now, if your support executives are fully trained in cross-selling, they can pitch your antivirus software smartly to the users.
4. Conduct a market research
Thorough market research will help you find the best platforms to address customer issues. Once you shortlist the popular social platforms, start offering customer service through your social media accounts and pages.
5. Find what to track and how to track
Just listening to everything that your customers are saying is not feasible. You must also decide what to track and how to track it. A clear plan can help you monitor the things that can affect your brand’s image and customer service.
While using social listening tools, you can focus on these things:
Brand mentions
Industry buzzwords
Customer complaints and feedback
Customer appreciation received through reviews and feedback
Hashtags relevant to your business
Hashtags related to your competitors
Mention your industry influencers
Tracking how the influencers engage with your target audience
6. Collaborate with influencers
You can also collaborate with the influencers to keep a close eye on the customer’s issues and concerns. By working with them, you can create formidable customer acquisition and retention strategies. Learn how to pitch relevant products or services by analyzing customer service.
Conclusion
Social listening is a much quicker and more cost-effective solution than traditional marketing tools. Use social listening tools to improve customer service and retain customers. You can also integrate these social listening tools for online crisis management.
Identify the right channels for handling customer queries and complaints. After that, you can focus on picking the right social listening platform. Konnect Insights can help you manage the customer experience. Its myriad of features enables you to evaluate customer conversations. Finally, you can improve your existing customer service portals to integrate social listening activities seamlessly!
Attaining a healthy work-life balance becomes a challenge for employees as they have to juggle multiple responsibilities at the workplace and at home while maintaining relationships with their family members.
So, how can employers help their employees achieve a better work-life balance while being productive at work?
From trying out different work schedules to doing away with unnecessary meetings, check out a few actionable steps employers can take to help employees find a healthy personal and professional balance.
What Is Work-Life Balance?
Work-life balance is all about creating a balanced environment for employees that allows them to accomplish their job duties efficiently while giving them ample time to prioritize their personal lives. A better work-life balance enables individuals to work productively while taking care of their well-being after office hours.
However, due to the rising demand to achieve greater results, employees are struggling to strike the right balance between their personal and professional lives. This is the reason why business leaders and employers must step in to help employees achieve a state of equilibrium so that they can prioritize both lives equally.
Ways to Improve Work-Life Balance
Allow Adequate Paid Time Off
One of the best ways to help employees attain a work-life balance is by providing them with adequate paid time off. Many employers are, in fact, providing unlimited paid time off options to promote an employee-centric environment. Employees can take time offs whenever needed to recharge and refresh, spend more time with family, plan a vacation, or complete personal work.
Besides, managers must encourage employees to use their PTO whenever they need it and make sure that employees don’t hesitate or feel guilty to request time off. Managers are supposed to set the tone of the workplace, therefore, they can lead by example by taking time off from work for a much-deserved rest.
They can also demonstrate the significance of work-life balance by leaving the office on time, taking adequate breaks, and not mailing to employees when they are on time off.
In addition, employers can adopt simple practices to promote work-life balance, such as challenging employees to meet their friends and family at least once a week, whether on weekends or by using paid time off.
Try Alternative Schedules Over Traditional 9 to 5 Approach
As the demand for more flexibility has surged, employers are experimenting with different work schedules that are way too versatile and flexible over the regular ones. For instance, in the flex schedule, employees can work at their own pace; that is, they can work during the time which is convenient to them and when they feel most productive.
In other words, here, employers give their employees the freedom to do their work any time of the day or week.
Similarly, compressed workweek schedules such as 9/80 and 4/10 are renowned for their different approaches, which squeeze the total work hours of a week into fewer days. For instance, in a 9/80 work schedule, the total 80 hours of two weeks are completed in 9 days rather than ten days, thus providing an additional day off every second week.
In addition, companies nowadays are also opting for a 4-day work week to render their employees more flexibility and work-life balance.
Adopt Remote and Hybrid Work Culture
Remote workers cite better work-life balance and overall wellness, as remote working provides employees with the freedom to organize their day at their convenience. As a result, they can do their job when they feel most productive and make sufficient time for other activities outside of work.
Besides, many employers are switching to a hybrid work culture that enables employees to work 2 to 3 days from the workplace and other days from home. This schedule allows employees to interact with colleagues on a regular basis and gives them a break from the daily commute while offering more time to spend with their families.
Cut Down on Unnecessary Meetings
One of the major productivity killers is the time squandered on various meetings. With the work-from-home culture, the biggest disadvantage that appeared is that the meetings or discussions that could have been done within a few minutes have now taken the form of half an hour-long Zoom meetings.
What’s more, in order to discuss a few things with multiple stakeholders and colleagues, employees may have to block their calendars for a certain time. On top of that, some employees don’t need to attend certain meetings since they don’t have much to contribute, which ultimately wastes their time and reduces their productivity.
So, look into the calendar of employees; if they are loaded with multiple meeting slots, then there are chances that they may not be able to focus on their main work and may have to compensate for it by working extra hours outside the office.
Consider freeing up the employee’s calendar by discarding unnecessary conferences and meetings. Instead, establish a system of half an hour brainstorming sessions in which team members of a project can meet and discuss things in advance in order to clear any doubts or roadblocks.
Build an Employee-Centric Company That Supports Young Parents
All employees have a family to look after, and the best way an employer can improve employees’ morale is by supporting them with their responsibilities. For instance, many organizations are providing their employees with free backup childcare, workplace daycare, remote learning pods for kids, sabbaticals, and additional paid family leaves, so that young parents can pay attention to their young children while pursuing their jobs.
Employers should also consider providing perks and benefits such as maternity, paternity, or shared parental leaves to employees with young children so that they have sufficient time to complete their parenthood responsibilities.
Avoid Glorifying Busy Work Culture and Overworking
One of the biggest reasons why employees in certain industries feel more burnout is due to the culture of staying super busy and working extra hard. Especially in organizations where it’s a norm that overworking and taking extra responsibilities is a measure of your dedication to your job, it is likely that employees will face burnout, stress, and ultimately experience work-life imbalance.
Thus, it is crucial that employers should stop promoting a work culture where overworked employees are considered the epitome of ideal workers. Instead, they should spread a message that the ideal worker is someone who is efficient at the workplace but at the same time has a great life outside of their office. Furthermore, they should encourage employees to take ample rest and sleep every day as the well-rested employees are most productive and creative.
Encourage Employees to Take Sufficient Breaks
According to a published survey report from Tork, 9 out of 10 respondents revealed that they are more likely to stay in an organization where employers encourage their employees to take breaks in between work. Breaks are crucial as they help restore productivity and creativity levels when working long shifts.
Besides, breaks give desk job workers some time to rest their eyes and the entire body. Taking breaks in between work not only helps in increasing productivity, but also makes employees feel more engaged, energized, and relaxed.
To promote breaks in your organization, managers can leverage the Pomodoro technique method that follows the approach of taking a 5-minute break after every 25 minutes of work. Managers can also organize some fun activities or games to help employees disconnect from work for a while. Some employers are also establishing a dedicated space known as a nap area or nap pods, where employees can take a nap while at work to get refreshed.
Communicate with Employees Regularly
If you want to create a better work-life balance for your employees, the foremost thing is to communicate with your employees regularly. For example, managers can book a monthly one-on-one meeting with their team members to ask them about their well-being and workload. Let them know if they can do anything to support their wellness or need help in prioritizing their work schedules.
It is recommended that managers regularly assess the employees’ workload and productivity. Suppose they witness a sudden slip in performance or an excessive absenteeism pattern. In that case, they should try to communicate with employees if they are facing any challenge inside or outside the workplace and if they can help them sort it out.
In addition, they can encourage them to avail of their PTO if they need a break from work or offer other such solutions. Besides, employers should have an open-door policy so that employees can reach out to management if they face any issues and express their concerns freely without any fear of repercussions.
Bottom Line
Striking the right balance between professional and personal lives is challenging for every employee. However, employers can help their employees find a better work-life balance by adopting the above-mentioned ways. Following these practices will not only make workers happier and more productive but also, your company will be known to promote a better work-life balance that will help you attract top talent and retain the best ones.
“If you don’t want to work within constraints, become an artist.” That is what one of my design lecturers told me when I was at university back when the web wasn’t even a thing.
That has turned out to be one of the most useful pieces of advice I ever received in my career and has led me to embrace and even enjoy working within constraints, which probably explains why I tend to specialize in highly regulated sectors with enormous amounts of stakeholders and legacy.
So, if you find working within constraints challenging, this is the post for you. In it, I hope to change your attitude towards constraints and provide practical ways of dealing with even the most frustrating barriers.
But let’s begin by looking at the kind of constraints you could find yourself facing.
Constraints On Every Side
The constraints we face come in all shapes and sizes, from technical constraints due to legacy technology or backwards compatibility to legal constraints relating to compliance requirements or accessibility.
Then there can be inadequate availability of images, video, and text or simply a lack of access to stakeholders.
However, the biggest two, without a doubt, are a lack of time and a lack of resources (either money or people). In fact, it is rare to encounter a project where somebody is not in a hurry, and you have enough resources to do the job properly!
It is easy to let all of these obstacles demoralize you, but I would encourage you to embrace, rather than resist, their constraints.
Why You Should Embrace Your Constraints
Constraints are not a set of necessary evils we have to endure. Instead, they are the core of what shapes the work we do.
Constraints provide a clear set of guidelines and limitations, which can help focus the design process and prevent scope creep.
Constraints help to build trust with clients or stakeholders, as they can see that the designer is able to work within their limitations and still deliver a high-quality product.
But most importantly of all, constraints can lead to more creative and innovative solutions, as designers are forced to think creatively within the given limitations.
I have done some of my best work over the years precisely because of the constraints placed upon me, not despite them.
Not that you should blindly accept every constraint placed upon you.
Know When To Push Back Against Constraints
Unsurprisingly, I would encourage you to challenge constraints that are based on incorrect assumptions or outdated information. However, you won’t come across those that frequently.
More common are constraints that make sense from “a certain point of view.” However, these kinds of constraints are not always right within the context of the project and its long-term objectives.
For example, attempting to deliver a project within a strict budget and on an aggressive schedule may reduce the cost to the organization. But it will substantially increase the risk of the project failing, and so ultimately, the money and time that were spent will be wasted.
Another common example is compliance constraints. These constraints exist to protect the organization from possible risk, but many larger organizations become so risk-averse that they undermine their competitiveness in the market. They swap one type of risk for another.
The key in these situations is to demonstrate the cost of any constraint placed upon you.
Demonstrating The Cost Of An Unhealthy Constraint
Often, those who impose constraints upon you do not see the problems these constraints create. This is usually because they are only thinking in terms of their own area of responsibility. For example, a compliance officer is only going to be thinking about compliance and not the broader user experience. Equally, the IT department is going to be more focused on security and privacy than conversion or usability.
Ultimately the decision of whether to enforce a constraint or not comes down to balancing multiple factors. Therefore, what you need to do is
Demonstrate the cost associated with a constraint so that senior management (who take a more holistic view) has all of the facts to make a final decision.
You can demonstrate the cost in one of three ways. You can either focus on the damage that a constraint causes, the cost of not taking an action the constraint prevents, or the lost opportunities imposed by the constraint.
Let’s look at each to help you see more clearly how this can work.
Highlight The Hidden Damage Of A Constraint
I once worked for a consumer electronics company. One of their biggest sellers was a kettle that included a water filter which prevented limescale build-up (I know, I work on the most exciting projects!)
The company insisted that when somebody added the kettle to their shopping cart, we should automatically add a set of water filters as well.
This is a well-known dark pattern that damages the user experience, but I also knew that it was increasing the average order value, a key metric the e-commerce team tracked.
To combat this constraint, I knew I had to demonstrate that it was causing damage that the e-commerce team and leadership were unaware of. So, I took the following steps:
I gathered evidence on social media of users complaining about this issue.
I contacted the customer support team to get some metrics about the number of complaints.
I contacted the returns team to find out how many people returned the filters.
I looked on review sites to see the number of negative reviews relating to filters.
Sure enough, I found substantial evidence that this was a major issue among consumers. But I didn’t stop there. I wanted to associate a financial cost with the decision, so I made some estimates:
I researched the average cost of dealing with a complaint and combined it with the data from the customer services team to guess the overall cost of dealing with filter complaints.
I used a similar approach to work out an approximate cost of processing returned filters.
Now, let me be clear, these were nothing more than guesses on my part. My figures were not accurate, and people in the company were quick to challenge them. But associating a dollar value with the problem got their attention!
I agreed that my figures were probably wildly off and suggested we did some proper research to find out the real cost.
You don’t need hard data to demonstrate there is a problem. An educated guess is good enough to start a discussion.
Of course, not all constraints are actively causing damage. Some are merely preventing some better action from being taken. In these cases, you need a different approach.
Focus On The Cost Of Inaction
Over time, an organization establishes processes and procedures that have been proven to work for them. The bigger the organization, the more standard operating procedures they have, and the more constraints you encounter.
Well-established companies become so afraid of losing their position that they become extremely risk-averse, and so place considerable constraints on any project.
People succeed in organizations like this by doing what has been done before. This can be problematic for those of us who work in digital because most of what we are trying to do is new.
To combat this bias towards the status quo, we need to demonstrate the cost of inaction. Put another way, we need to show management that if they do not do things differently, it will threaten the market position the organization has established.
In most cases, the best approach is to focus on the competition. Do a bit of research and show that the competition is less risk-averse and gaining market share as a result. Keep mentioning how they are doing things differently and how that threatens your organization’s market position.
Another tactic is to demonstrate how customer expectations have changed and that if the company does not act, they will begin to lose market share.
This is particularly easy to do because users’ expectations regarding digital have skyrocketed in recent years.
“The last best experience that anyone has anywhere becomes the minimum expectation for the experiences they want everywhere.” — Bridget van Kranlingen, Senior Vice President of IBM Global Markets
Put another way, users are comparing your organization’s subpar digital experience to the very best of what they are interacting with online, even when that comparison is not fair.
A bit of user research goes a long way in this regard. For example, consider running a system usability scale survey to compare your digital platforms to this industry benchmark. Alternatively, run a survey asking how important the digital experience is to customers.
While fear of losing market share is a big motivator to well-established businesses, younger, hungrier businesses tend to be more motivated by lost opportunities.
Demonstrate Lost Opportunities
Your management, stakeholders, and colleagues often do not realize what they are missing out on because of the constraints they place upon you. It, therefore, falls to you to demonstrate those opportunities.
Sometimes, you can make this case with analytics. For example, recently, I was working with a client who insisted on having a pricing page on their website, despite the fact the page showed no pricing! Instead, the page had a request pricing form.
They wanted to keep the page because they were afraid to lose the handful of leads that came via the page. However, I was able to convince them otherwise by pointing out that the page was actively alienating the majority of users who visited it, effectively losing them leads.
I did this by demonstrating the page had a higher bounce rate than any other page on the site, was the most common exit page, and had the lowest dwell time.
But analytics is not my favorite approach for demonstrating lost opportunities. Instead, I typically turn to prototyping.
Prototyping is a great way of demonstrating exactly what an organization will miss out on if they insist on unreasonable constraints, presuming, that is, that you create a prototype that is free from those constraints.
I use this approach all the time. Imagine, for example, that you have been told that a particular technology stack imposes a set of restrictive constraints on how an interface is designed. By prototyping what the interface could be if you were free from those constraints, you can make a powerful case for changing the technology stack.
Having a prototype gives you something to test against. You can use usability testing to provide hard evidence of how much it improves the user experience, findability, and even conversion.
Even more significantly, a prototype will excite internal stakeholders. If your prototype is compelling enough, they will want that solution, and that changes the conversation.
Instead of you having to justify why the IT stack needs to be changed, now the IT team has to justify why their IT stack cannot accommodate your solution. Stakeholders and management will want to know why they cannot have what they have fallen in love with.
Of course, people will not always fall in love with your prototype, and ultimately, many of your attempts to overcome constraints will fail despite your best efforts, and you need to accept that.
Conceding Defeat With Grace
Let’s be clear. It is your job to demonstrate to management or clients that a constraint placed upon you is unhealthy. They cannot be expected to know instinctively. They do not have your perspective on the project and so cannot see what you see.
This means that if they fail to remove the constraint you consider unhealthy, it is your failing to demonstrate the problem, not their fault.
Sure, you might consider them shortsighted or naive. But ultimately, you failed to make your case.
Also, it is important to note that you don’t always have the whole picture. A decision may be bad from a user experience perspective, for example, but it may be the right thing for the business. There will always be other factors at play that you are unaware of.
So when you fail to make your case, accept that with grace and do your best to work within the constraints given to you.
Ultimately your working relationship with management, colleagues, and clients is more important than your professional pride and getting your way.
As web design technologies raise the bar on what it is possible to achieve on a realistic budget, there’s a rising debate about whether increasing features and functionality offer increased value or whether simple websites are better for businesses.
In today’s business landscape, creating a seamless and personalized customer experience across multiple channels is a necessity. A report states that businesses that use omnichannel strategies retain 89% of their customers compared to those that don’t.
This is where an email strategy comes in handy. By integrating email marketing into your omnichannel strategy, you can create consistent and nurturing experiences for customers. In this guide, we’ll explore the role of email marketing in boosting omnichannel customer experience.
Understanding Omnichannel Customer Experience
When it comes to serving customers, “all channels equal,” or “omnichannel,” is the gold standard. The components include physical stores, online/ecommerce platforms, social media, mobile apps, and email.
Omnichannel ensures that customers can interact with your brand in the way that suits them best, and all channels work together cohesively to provide the customer with a consistent brand experience.
The Challenges of Creating an Omnichannel Experience
The main challenge of creating an omnichannel experience is to synchronize all channels, ensuring that they work in harmony. Poor integration can result in unstructured, disconnected communication with the customer. Other challenges of creating an omnichannel experience include:
Integrating disparate systems and technologies
Ensuring consistency across all channels
Providing a unified customer view
For example, a customer has a different experience using the brand’s website versus their mobile app, and their purchase history does not carry over between channels.
Email marketing can play a critical role in overcoming these challenges. Using an omnichannel email strategy, you can connect with customers at every stage of their journey. By crafting effective email campaigns, you can deliver targeted and relevant messages, thereby promoting engagement and sales.
The Role of Email Strategy in Boosting Omnichannel Customer Experiences
Customers still prefer using email as a means of contact. According to the Global Messaging Engagement Report, email was cited as one of the top three communication channels by 18% of respondents. What’s more, 77% of respondents check their email inbox daily or even more often.
Due to its effectiveness and high return on investment (ROI), email remains the backbone of most marketers’ omnichannel marketing campaigns. In fact, the average ROI for an email marketing campaign is $36 for every $1 spent.
Let’s take a look at how you can use the strengths of email marketing to build omnichannel client interaction.
1. Adapt email targeting based on recipients’ actions on other channels.
You can boost your customer engagement and drive revenue to your brand by leveraging user data from various channels. The data can then be used to trigger automated email campaigns. For example, sending personalized and timely emails based on customer actions can significantly increase their interaction with your brand. Here are a few ideas:
If a customer abandons their cart, send an email reminder to encourage them to complete their purchase.
After a successful interaction with your web chat support team, follow up with an email asking for feedback and a review of the service.
Show appreciation to customers who make a purchase by sending a personalized thank-you email and offering a coupon code for their next purchase.
By utilizing these automated email campaigns, you can efficiently nurture customer relationships and drive conversions for your products and services.
2. Gather customer data to supercharge your marketing.
Email and data go together like peanut butter and jelly, complementing each other perfectly.
Acquiring first-party data is essential for building a robust customer profile, and email is one of the most effective methods for collecting such data. For instance, when a user joins your email list, you can start collecting information about them for behavior-based targeting. After they sign up, you can even ask for additional information by inviting them to finish their profile or change their email settings.
Emails can then be tailored to each recipient based on this information and other data collected from customers across multiple channels. For instance, you can personalize the email based on the customer’s location, demographic information, the products they browsed on your site, and much more.
3. Keep communication flowing between relevant channels.
Customers may be unaware of the new channels you’ve added to your communication strategy. Use the following methods to invite subscribers to contact you in new ways by leveraging the widespread use of email:
Offer a special discount to consumers who sign up for both email and SMS at the same time. To do this, simply add a phone number input field to your email signup form.
Tell your email list subscribers to get the app so they may participate in the loyalty program and enjoy other benefits.
You can improve your customer service response time by including a link to live chat in your emails.
Best Practices for Using Email in Omnichannel Customer Experience
Get your customers out of the mobile maze!
We live in a world where mobile devices have become an extension of our lives, and customers expect businesses to meet their mobile engagement needs. However, many businesses are falling short, leaving customers frustrated and disengaged.
Recent research shows that over half of customers are deterred from doing business with a company if they have a poor mobile experience. That’s a lot of potential business lost!
So, what can businesses do to avoid losing customers? It’s simple: prioritize mobile.
Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly in terms of viewing and navigation and that your customer service support is easily accessible on mobile. By providing a seamless mobile experience, you’ll not only keep your customers happy but also stand out from your competition.
Avoid keeping your clientele waiting.
While email may be perceived as a slower communication channel for customer service, it doesn’t diminish the importance of providing prompt resolutions.
Email conversations may not have the real-time nature of phone calls or live chats, but customers still expect timely and satisfactory resolutions to their inquiries or issues. Failing to address customer concerns promptly can lead to frustration, dissatisfaction, and even negative word-of-mouth.
Automation is one approach to fulfilling these requirements. By setting up automated email responses for common queries, businesses can acknowledge the customer’s message and provide relevant information within seconds, even outside regular business hours.
Maintain data across all platforms.
For a consumer, nothing is more frustrating than being passed around from platform to platform, only to have to rehash their story each time. Customer frustration can be reduced by enhancing knowledge management across all platforms and teams.
“Customer service, social media, chatbot Platform, and other channels must be coordinated with email to deliver a consistent experience.”
There’s a good chance you’ll lose a customer if they call and are routed around to a different channel just to be asked to repeat themselves. Instead, offer a direct line of contact, and make it such that the support staff may quickly access the customer’s previous messages when prompted with a reference (such as the customer’s name). With this in place, things should go more easily.
To have a place that collects all data from each channel, you can hire a Node.js developer, that will maintain the company server and will build algorithms that allow organizing and use of data appropriately.
Test, Test, Test…
Many companies who invest in an omnichannel customer service strategy forget the most crucial step: testing.
The omnichannel experience can be evaluated in terms of success and failure by using the customer service software you already have in place.
This paints a crucial big picture for you. However, there is no better way to find out if everything is operating smoothly than to start a live chat or tweet and wait to see the speed and quality of the answer.
Conclusion
The future belongs to companies that implement omnichannel customer service.
To grow a robust email support system, it’s important to learn why your customers prefer email and to keep your cross-channel support standards at a high level.
Keep in mind that the human element is the glue that holds everything together. The secret to offering excellent customer service is having well-trained personnel who can solve customer problems and make a good impression.
Ultimately, the goal of any customer service channel is to deliver a positive and trustworthy experience that will strengthen your bond with the people who use it.
Developing and implementing a reliable and carefully considered business security system remains a top priority for modern employers, with dedicated security teams expected to identify and neutralize sophisticated physical and cybersecurity threats with the aid of proactive and intelligent technologies.
Commercial security systems have been revolutionized in recent years as industry professionals seek to better address novel risks, provide employees with a more convenient way to access core facilities, and markedly improve incident response times with support from integrated remote-access systems.
With data suggesting that the number of recorded significant cyber-attacks may have risen globally by as much as 38% in the last year alone, and crimes against property account for over 60% of all reported crimes in recent times, business leaders must have plans in place to deter common threats.
To help achieve this, here are 4 commercial security trends to consider in your company’s strategy.
Ensuring that access to all company facilities is appropriately secured behind considered physical security devices is essential to protect businesses from instances of physical violence and theft, but choosing to operate traditional access control systems may no longer provide adequate protection.
Legacy solutions such as RFID, NFC, and pin code access systems may hinder unauthorized persons from gaining property access to some degree, though in many cases, unauthorized intruders are able to compromise such systems by simply stealing, duplicating, or brute-forcing relevant permissions.
Businesses can lessen these risks and markedly strengthen on-site security policies by choosing to develop smart commercial access control systems configured to accept secure digital credentials. Rather than issuing easily lost and hard-to-monitor key cards and fobs, mobile systems allow security teams to send staff unique digital credentials to be stored and managed within a smartphone application.
Mobile systems offer touch-free property access, allow users to secure their credentials behind extra protections like in-device multi-factor authentication (MFA) and biometric locks, and allow security teams to remotely adjust or revoke permissions if they suspect a credential has been compromised, providing businesses with reliable 24/7 protection to deter physical intrusions and property crime.
Advanced AI technologies and machine learning algorithms are currently transforming a number of modern industries, with commercial security providers being just one of many to benefit from these novel solutions. Recently published data indicates as many as 77% of businesses are currently using or exploring the use of AI systems, with 61% believing AI tools to be necessary for security purposes.
One of the primary benefits presented by the integration of AI technology alongside traditional security devices is the application of automated smart data analytics used to improve the efficacy of installed video security cameras. For example, AI-informed object detection software can be used to identify suspected weapons or contraband items, instantly alerting on-site security staff to provide a response.
Modern AI software tools are able to apply intelligent machine learning algorithms to recorded data, meaning active systems can be configured to automatically detect anomalous events such as crowds forming in unusual areas, and instantly notify teams of disturbances via cloud-based communications.
Installing and operating such solutions enables on-site security teams to better focus their efforts only on matters of immediate importance, removing the need for staff to constantly monitor live video feeds and ensuring that no potentially harmful incidents or significant threats go undetected or ignored.
Typically, when businesses choose to install and operate modern security technologies such as mobile access control systems and AI-informed video security cameras, teams will also choose to develop a cloud-based security management platform used to provide a holistic view of all active devices.
Cloud-based security management allows security staff to view and adjust connected security devices remotely from within a single easily navigated platform, with further benefits found in the ability to link a range of Internet Protocol (IP) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the same system, enabling the creation of automatic security responses triggered by the activation of specific devices in the network.
In practice, this means if a suspected intruder is detected by installed security cameras or IoT motion sensors, this information can be used to automatically engage all nearby access control devices and locking mechanisms, sealing the property and instantly notifying security staff of the unfolding event.
Developing such a system allows for the creation of bespoke security responses as staff can choose which devices should be programmed to inform the operation of connected systems. Considering that 94% of enterprises already use cloud services, upgrading existing networks will often be achievable.
Modern businesses aren’t only expected to contend with a myriad of physical security threats, in fact, recent reports indicate as many as 96% of executives consider cybersecurity resilience to be a top priority with regards to internal operations. As many organizations now operate physical security devices capable of communicating with digital systems, security convergence is likely to become increasingly essential.
Physical and cybersecurity convergence describes a considered approach to enterprise security in which all relevant digital systems and all physical security devices are subject to dedicated policies and procedures, specifically designed to protect integrated networks from both physical and cyber-attacks.
This means physical security staff and IT teams will work together to assess all active systems and ensure that all settings and operational policies are configured to detect and respond to both physical and digital threats, typically via the deployment of combined risk assessments and training programs.
Choosing to implement converged security policies ensures that all security professionals within an organization understand how to identify and address gaps and vulnerabilities in essential systems, reducing the risks associated with cross-platform breaches and strengthening wider security policies.
Summary
Developing a reliable and proactive commercial building security system remains a top priority for organizations across all major industries, though to appropriately prepare for and defend against modern threats, security, and IT teams must prioritize adaptive systems and policies to improve their security posture.
By investing in smart technology systems and integrated cloud-based management platforms, business leaders are able to provide security staff with a more holistic view of all installed systems and assist teams in creating automated incident responses, helping to strengthen commercial security strategies.
Tables are one of the most popular ways to visualize data. Presenting data in tables is so ubiquitous — and core to the web itself — that I doubt many of you reading this have any trouble with the basics of the
Though, I’d even go so far as to say that tables are an integral part of our daily life.
That’s why we need to start thinking about making tables more inclusive. The web is supposed to be designed for everybody. That includes those with impairments that may prevent access to the information in the tables we make and rely on assistive technology to “read” them.
For the last several months, I’ve been working on this scientific project around inclusive design for people with cognitive disorders for my university degree. I’ve mostly focused on developing guidelines to help educational platforms adapt to such users.
I also work for a company that has developed a JavaScript library for creating pivot tables used for business analysis and data visualizations. At one point in my research, I found that tables are a type of popular data representation that can simultaneously be a lifesaver and a troublemaker, yes, for people with learning and cognitive problems, but for everyone else as well. Remember, we are all temporarily “abled” and prone to lose abilities like eyesight and hearing over time.
Plus, a well-executed inclusive table design is a pathway to improving everyone’s productivity and overall experience, regardless of impairment.
Cognitive disorders are defined as any kind of disorder that significantly impairs an individual’s conscious intellectual activity, such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering.
ADHD is one example that prevents a person from remaining focused or paying attention. There’s also dyslexia , which makes it tough to recognize and comprehend written words. Dyscalculia is specific to working with numbers and arithmetic.
For those without this condition, it is difficult to understand what exactly can be wrong with the perception of written information. But based on the descriptions of people with the relevant deviations, simulators were created that imitate what people with dyslexia see.
Currently, you can even install a special browser extension to estimate how difficult your site will be to perceive by people with this deviation. It is much more difficult to understand the condition of people with ADHD, but certain videos with ADHD simulations do exist, which can also allow you to evaluate the level of difficulty in the perception of any information by such people.
These are all things that can make it difficult for people to use tables on the web. Tables are capable of containing lots of information that requires a high level of cognitive work.
The first stage toward helping users with such deviations is to understand their condition and feel its details on themselves — in other words, practicing empathy.
The second stage is to systematize the details and identify specific usability problems to solve.
Please indulge me as we dive a bit into some psychological theory that is important to understand when designing web pages.
Cognitive Load
Cognitive load relates to the amount of information that working memory can hold at one time. Our memory has a limited capacity, and instructional methods should avoid overloading it with unnecessary activities and information that competes with what the individual needs to complete their task.
UX professionals often say complex tasks that require the use of external resources may result in an increased cognitive load. But the amount of the load can be affected by any additional information, unusual design, or wrong type of data visualization. When a person is accustomed to a particular representation of certain types of data — like preferred date format or where form input labels are positioned — even a seemingly minor change increases the processing time of our brain.
Here’s an example: If a particular student is from a region where content is presented in a right-to-left direction and the software they are provided by their university only supports a left-to-right direction, the amount of mental work it takes to comprehend the information will be greater compared to other students.
I also want to call special attention to cognitive biases, which are systematic errors in thinking that become patterns of deviation from rationality in judgment. When people are processing and interpreting information around them, it often can influence the decisions a person makes without even noticing.
For example, the peak-end rule says that people judge an experience by its “peak” and last interactions. It’s easy to prove. Try to reflect on a game you used to play as a kid, whether it’s from an arcade, a computer console, or something you played online. What do you remember about it? Probably the level that was hardest for you and the ending. That’s the“peak” of your experience and the last, most “fresh” one, and they create your overall opinion of the game. For more examples, there is a fantastic resource that outlines 106 different types of cognitive biases and how they affect UX.
Signal-to-noise Ratio
Last but not least, I’d like to touch on the concept of a signal-to-noise ratio briefly. It is similar to the engineering term but relates to the concept that most of the information we encounter is noise that has nothing to do with a user’s task.
Relevant and necessary information is a signal.
The ratio is the proportion of relevant information to irrelevant information.
A designer’s goal is to achieve a high signal-to-noise ratio because it increases the efficiency of how information is transmitted. The information applied to this ratio can be anything: text, illustrations, cards, tables, and more.
The main idea about cognitive disabilities I want you to take away is that they make individuals very sensitive to the way the information is presented. A font that’s too small or too bright will make content unperceivable. Adding gratuitous sound or animation may result in awful distractions (or worse) instead of nice enhancements.
I’ll repeat it:
A good user experience will prevent cognitive overload for everyone. It’s just that we have to remember that many out there are more sensitive to such noises and loads.
Focusing on individuals with specific considerations only gives you a more detailed view of what you need to solve for everybody to live a simpler life.
Considering Cognitive Disorders In UX Design
Now that we have defined the main problems that can arise in a design, I can sum up our goals for effective UX:
Reduce the cognitive load.
Maximize the signal-to-noise ratio.
Use correct cognitive biases to boost the user experience.
“Design” is a loaded term meaning lots of different things, from colors and fonts to animations and sounds and everything in between. All of that impacts the way an individual understands the information that is presented to them. This does not mean all design elements should be excluded when designing table elements. A good table design is invisible. The design should serve content, not the other way around.
With the help of lots of academic, professional, and personal research, I’ve developed a set of recommendations that I believe will result in cognitive-friendly and easy-to-perceive table designs.
Color Palettes And Usage
We should start by talking about the color because if the colors used in a table are improperly implemented, subsequent decisions do not really matter.
Many people consider colors to have their meanings, which differ from culture to culture. That’s certainly true in a sociological sense, but as far as UX is concerned, the outcome is the same — colors carry information and emotions and are often unnecessary to mean something in a design.
Rule 1: Aim For A Minimalist Color Palette
When you see a generous use of color in a table, it isn’t to make the table more functional but to make a design stand out. I won’t say that using fewer colors guarantees a more functional table, but more color tends to result in individuals losing attention from the right things.
Accordingly, bright colors and accents should highlight information that has established meaning. This isn’t to say that interesting color schemes and advanced color palettes are off-limits. This means using colors wisely. They are a means to an end rather than a splash of paint for attention.
Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger offer a perfect example of color usage in a design study of customized Slack themes. Consider the two following interfaces. It may not seem like it at first, but the second UI actually has a more extensive color palette than the first.
The difference is that the second interface applies shades of the core color defined in the palette and that brighter and more vibrant shades are only used to highlight the important stuff.
You can explore this phenomenon by yourself and test your perception of the colors in the design by changing the look of your messenger. For example, Telegram has some interface customization options, and while playing with that, I noticed I read and navigate between my chats in the “Night Accent” mode rather than the plain “System” mode.
Of course, both designs were designed for people with different preferences and characteristics, but such a personal experiment led me to the following thought. Even though the second option uses fewer colors, the uniformity of information is a bit confusing. From this, I concluded that too few colors and too minimal a design is also a bad choice. It is necessary to find a balance between the color palette and its usage.
That said, I suggest using a “shading” monochromatic approach for tables. It means defining a base color in a palette, then expanding it with different shades in dark and light directions. In other words:
Choose a primary color.
Define an evenly darker and lighter shade of that primary color.
This produces two more colors to which you can apply the previous technic to create colors that are a perfect compromise between the shades on either side. Repeat this process until you reach the number of colors you need (generally, 7–9 shades will do).
Rule 2: Embrace The Power Of Whitespace
I find that it’s good to offer a fair amount of “breathing room” around elements rather than trying to crowd everything in as close as possible. For example, finding a balance of space between the table rows and columns enhances the legibility of the contents as it helps distinguish the UI from the information.
I’ll qualify this by noting that “breathing room” often depends on the type of data that’s being presented, as well as the size of the device on which it’s being viewed. As such, it sometimes makes sense to enhance a table’s functionality by allowing the user to adjust the height and width of rows and columns for the most optimal experience.
If you are worried about using too few or too many colors, apply the 60/30/10 rule. It’s a basic pattern for any distribution selection. People use this strategy when budgeting assets like content and media, and it’s applicable to design. The rule says the color usage should be distributed as follows:
60% for neutral colors,
30% for primary colors,
10% for secondary colors (e.g., highlights, CTAs, and alerts).
Rule 3: Avoid Grays
Talking about neutral colors, in color theory, gray represents neutrality and balance. Its color meaning likely comes from being the shade between white and black and often is also perceived as the absence of color. You can not overdo it; its light shades do not oppress, so gray is just “okay.”
However, gray does carry some negative connotations, particularly when it comes to depression and loss. Its absence of color makes it dull. For this reason, designers often resort to it to de-emphasize an element or certain bits of data.
But maintaining such a philosophy of gray color will only work in black and white designs, such as on the Apple website. Though, as I mentioned before, it actually works really well as grey is the tone of black or a shade of white.
The problem, however, comes up when other colors are added to the color palette, which leads to a change in a color’s roles and functions. In the case of gray, putting it next to brighter colors makes the design pale and dull.
Having no color of its own, gray seems to eat away the brightness of neighboring elements. Instead of maintaining balance, gray makes the design cloudy and unclear. After all, against the background of already illuminated elements, gray makes the elements not just less significant but unnecessary for our perception.
That does not mean you should totally give up gray. But highlighting some information inherently de-emphasizes other information, negating the need for gray in the first place.
The easy way out is to replace gray with lighter shades of a palette’s base color on a table cell’s background. The effect is the same, but the overall appearance will pop more without adding more noise or cognitive load.
Rule 4: Know What’s Worthy Of Highlighting
Designers are always looking for a way to make their work stand out. I get the temptation because bold and bright colors are definitely exciting and interesting.
Blogs can be considered a good example of this problem as their variety is wide and growing, and a lot of platforms prioritize exclusive design over inclusive design.
For example, Medium uses only black and shades of it for a color palette, which significantly facilitates even simple tasks like reading titles. Hackernoon, although looking interesting and drawing attention, requires more concentration and does not allow you to “breathe” as freely as on Medium.
In analytical software, that only leads to a table design that emphasizes a designer’s needs ahead of the user’s needs.
Don’t get me wrong — a palette that focuses on shades rather than a large array of exciting colors can still be exciting and interesting. That provides a discussion about which grid elements benefit from color. Here are my criteria for helping decide what those are and the colors that add the most benefit for the given situation.
Active cells: If the user clicks on a specific table cell or selects a group of cells, we can add focus to it to indicate the user’s place in the data. The color needs to call attention to the selection without becoming a distraction, perhaps by changing the border color with a base color and using a light shade of it for the background so as to maintain WCAG-compliant contrast with the text color.
Tip!It’s also good to highlight the row and column that a focused cell belongs to, as this information is a common thing to check when deciphering the cell’s meaning. You can highlight the entire row and column it belongs to or, even better, just the first cell of the row and column.
Error messaging: Error messages definitely benefit from color because, in general, errors contain critical feedback for the user to take corrective action.
A good example might be an injected alert that informs the user that the table’s functionality is disabled until an invalid data point is fixed. Reds, oranges, and yellows are commonly used in these situations but bear in mind that overly emphasizing an error can lead to panic and stress. (Speaking of error messaging, Vitaly Friedman has an extensive piece on designing effective error messages, including the pitfalls of relying too heavily on color.)
Outstanding data: I’m referring to any data in the table that is an outlier. For example, in a table that compares data points over time, we might want to highlight the high and low points for the sake of comparison. I suggest avoiding reds and greens, as they are commonly used to indicate success and failure. Perhaps styling the text color with a darker shade of a palette’s base color is all you need to call enough attention to these points without the user losing track of them.
The key takeaway:
Data-heavy tables are already overwhelming, and we don’t want any additional noise. Try to remove all unnecessary colors that add to a user’s cognitive load.
Tip!Remember the main goal when designing a table: reliability, not beauty. Always check your final decisions, ideally with a variety of target users. I really recommend using contrast checkers to spot mistakes quickly and efficiently correct them.
Typographical Considerations
The fonts we use to represent tabular data are another aspect of a table’s look and feel that we need to address when it comes to implementing an inclusive design. We want the data to be as legible and scannable as possible, and I’ve found that the best advice boils down to the typography of the content — especially for numerics — as well as how it is aligned.
Rule 1: The Best Font Is A “Simple” Font
The trick with fonts is the same as with colors: simplicity. The most effective font is one that takes less brainpower to interpret rather than one that tries to stand out.
No, you don’t need to ditch your Google Fonts or any other font library you already use, but choose a font from it that meets these recommendations:
Sans-serif fonts (e.g., Helvetica, Arial, and Verdana) are more effective because they tend to take up less space in a dense area — perfect for promoting more “breathing room” in a crowded table of data.
A large x-height is always easier to read. The X-height is the height of the body of a lowercase letter minus any ascenders or descenders. In other words, the height of the lowercase “x” in the font.
Monospace fonts make it easier to compare cells because the width of each character is consistent, resulting in evenly-spaced lines and cells.
Regular font weights are preferable to bolder weights because the boldfacing text is another form of highlighting or emphasizing content, which can lead to confusion.
A stable, open counter. The counter is a space in the letter “o” or the letter “b.” Fonts with distorted counters render poorly in small sizes and are hard to read.
Fonts that fulfill these criteria are more legible and versatile than others and should help whittle down the number of fonts you have to choose from when choosing your table design.
Rule 2: Number Formatting Matters
When choosing a font, designers often focus on good legible letters and forget about numbers. Needless to say, numbers often are what we’re displaying in tables. They deserve first-class consideration when it comes to choosing an effective font for a good table experience.
As I mentioned earlier, monospace fonts are an effective option when numbers are a table’s primary content. The characters take up the same width per character for consistent spacing to help align values between rows and columns. In my experience, finding a proportional font that doesn’t produce a narrow “1” is difficult.
If you compare the two fonts in the figure above, it’s pretty clear that data is easier to read and compare when the content is aligned and the characters use the same amount of space. There’s less distance for the eye to travel between data points and less of a difference in appearance to consider whether one value is greater than the other.
If you are dealing with fractions, you will want to consider a font that supports that format or go with a variable font that supports font-variant-numeric features for more control over the spacing.
Rule 3: There Are Only Two Table Alignments: Left And Right
Technically there are four alignments: left, right, center, and justify. We know that because the CSS text-alignment property supports all four of them.
My personal advice is to avoid using center alignment, except in less-common situations where unambiguous data is presented with consistently-sized icons. But that’s a significant and rare exception to the rule, and it is best to use caution and good judgment if you have to go there.
Justified content alters the spacing between characters to achieve a consistent line length, but that’s another one to avoid, as the goal is less about line lengths than it is about maintaining a consistent amount of space between characters for a quick scan. That is what monospaced fonts are effective for.
Data should instead be aligned toward the left or right, and which one is based on the user’s language preference.
Then again, at school, we’re taught to compare numbers in a right-to-left direction by looking first at single units, then tens, followed by hundreds, then thousands, and so forth. Accordingly, the right alignment could be a better choice that’s universally easier to read regardless of a person’s language preference. You may notice that spreadsheet apps like Excel, Sheets, and Notion align numeric values to the right by default.
There are exceptions to that rule, of course, because not all numbers are measurements. There are qualitative numbers that probably make more sense with left alignment since that is often the context in which they are used. They aren’t used for comparison and are perceived as a piece of text information written in numbers. Examples include:
Dates (e.g., 12/28/2050),
Zip/Postal code (e.g., 90815),
Phone number (e.g., 555-544-4349).
Table headings should be aligned to the same edge as the data presented in the column. I know there could be disagreement here, as the default UA styling for modern browsers centers table headings.
The screenshots above are examples of bad and good headers. When looking at the first screenshot, your initial focus is likely drawn to the column headers, which is good! That allows you to understand what the table is about quickly. But after that initial focus, the bold text is distracting and tricks your brain into thinking the header is the most important content.
The header in the second screenshot also uses bold text. However, notice how changing the color from black to white emphasizes the headers at the same time. That negates the impact bolding has, preventing potential cognitive load.
At this point, I should include a reminder to avoid gray when de-emphasizing table elements. For example, notice the numbers in the far left column and very top row. They get lost against the background color of the cells and even further obscured by the intense background color of surrounding cells. There’s no need to de-emphasize what is already de-emphasized.
I also suggest using short labels to prevent them from competing with the data. For example, instead of a heading that reads “Grand Total of Annual Revenue,” try something like “Total Revenue” or “Grand Total” instead.
Table Layout Considerations
There once was a time when tables were used to create webpage layouts because, again, it was a simple and understandable way to present the information in the absence of standardized CSS layout features. That’s not the case today, thankfully, but that period taught us a lot about best practices when working with table design that we can use today.
Rule 1: Fewer Borders = More White Space
Borders are commonly used to distinguish one element from one another. In tables, specifically, they might be used to form outlines around rows and columns. That distinction is great but faces the same challenge that we’ve covered with using color: too much of a layout can steal focus from the data, making the design busy and cluttered. With the proper design and text alignment, however, borders can become unnecessary.
Borders help us navigate the table and delimit individual records. At the same time, if there are many of them in a grid, it becomes a problem in large tables with a lot of rows and columns. To prevent the cells from being too densely connected, try adding more space between them with padding. As I have mentioned before, negative space is not an enemy but a design saver.
That said, the law of diminishing returns applies to how much space there should be, particularly when considering a table’s width. For example, a table might not need to flex to the full width of its parent container by default. It depends on the content, of course. Avoiding large spacing between columns will help prevent a reader’s eyes from having to travel far distances when scanning data and making mistakes.
I know that many front-enders struggle with column widths. Should they be even? Should they only be as wide as the content that’s in them? It’s a juggling act that, in my mind, is not worth the effort. Some cells will always be either too wide or too narrow when table cells contain data points that result in varying line lengths. Embrace that unevenness, allowing columns to take up a reasonable amount of space they need to present the data and scale down to as little as they need without being so narrow that words and numbers start breaking lines.
Lines should be kept to a minimum. Add them if adjusting the alignment, joining cells, and increased spacing is not enough to indicate the direction — or keep them as light as possible.
Allow multi-line wrapping when you really need it, such as when working with longer data points with just enough room around them to indicate the alignment direction. But if you caught yourself thinking of using multi-line wrapping in a grid, then first of all, analyze whether there is a more practical way to visualize the data.
Rule 2: Stylish rows, stylish columns
When deciding how to style a table’s rows, it’s important to understand the purpose of the table you are developing. Reducing visual noise will help to present a clear picture of the data on smaller datasets but not for large datasets.
It’s easy for a user to lose their place when scrolling through a table that contains hundreds or thousands of rows. This is where borders can help a great deal, as well as zebra striping, for a visual cue that helps anchor a user’s eyes enough to hold focus on a spot while scanning.
Speaking of zebra striping, it’s often used as a stylistic treatment rather than a functional enhancement. Being mindful of which colors are used for the striping and how they interact with other colors and shades used for highlighting information will go a long way toward maintaining a good user experience that avoids overwhelming color combinations. I often use a slightly darker shade of the table’s default background color on alternating rows (or columns) when establishing stripes. If that’s white, then I will go with the lightest shade of my palette’s base color. The same choice should be made while maintaining the borders — they should be marked but remain invisible.
Typically, row density gravitates around 40px-56px with a minimum padding of 16px on both the right and left edges of each column.
Feature Enhancements
Tables are often thought of as static containers for holding data, but we’ve all interacted with tables that do lots of other things, like filtering and reordering.
Whatever features are added to a table, it’s important to let users customize the table themselves based on their preferences. Then the user experience you create can become even better by conforming to the user’s comfort level. As with everything else, there is a line. Smaller datasets may not need the same enhancements for filtering data that large datasets do, for example, because they may wind up causing more confusion than convenience and raise the threshold for understanding the data.
In addition to the ability to customize a table’s elements, such as colors, fonts, conditional formatting, value formatting, and cell sizing, there are a few questions you can ask to help determine the enhancements a table might need for a better experience.
Could A User Lose Context When Scrolling?
We’ve already discussed how a table with hundreds of rows or columns can lead to many user scrolling and cognitive errors. Striping is one way to help users remain focused on a particular spot, but what if there’s so much scrolling that the table’s headers are no longer available?
If that’s a possibility, and the headers are important for establishing the context of the presented data, then you might consider sticky positioning on the headers so they are always available for reference. Chris Coyier has a nice demo that implements sticky headers and a sticky first column.
Who Can Have Problems Using My Design? (Accessibility Support)
Of all the points, this is the most difficult to implement, but at the same time, in our context, it is the most important. People with diagnosed abnormalities and disorders have a much stronger impact on their work process due to their condition. Therefore, supporting an additional — and optional — accessibility mode is necessary. Each element must be adapted for screen readers, navigable via keyboard, and contain the most semantic markup possible. This will help people who use assistive technology without a loss in performance.
Conclusion
Thanks for letting me share my best practices for presenting tabular data on the web. It’s amazing how something as seemingly simple as a table element can quickly grow in scope when we start considering user needs and enhancements to include as many of those needs as possible.
We discussed a great number of things that get in the way of an inclusive table design, including our own cognitive biases and design choices. At the same time, we covered strategies for tackling those obstacles from a wide range of considerations, from design choices all the way to determining possible features for enhancing a user’s experience when interacting with the table and the data it contains.
There can be a lot of headwork that goes into a table implementation, but not everything in this article has to be considered for every situation. A lot of the advice I’ve shared — like so many other things on the web — simply depends on the specific case. That’s why we spent a good amount of time defining the goals for an effective table experience:
Reduce the cognitive load.
Maximize the signal-to-noise ratio.
Use correct cognitive biases to boost the user experience.
But if you only take one thing away from this, I’d say it is this: in data analytics data > than everything else. Keeping that idea in mind throughout the development process prevents spoiling your design with frivolous designs and features that work against our goals.
With the evolution of technology, customer preferences have evolved, changed, and expanded. You have to work harder than your biggest competition to grab their low attention span. This is why you require innovative technologies to stand out in your customer’s inboxes.
The inboxes of your audiences are already crowded. How do you then engage with your subscribers and make them click, read and take action?
One of the best approaches is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) in email marketing. What is AMP and how do you use AMP email marketing to accelerate growth for your business? Let us understand in detail.
What are Accelerated Mobile Pages in Email Marketing?
AMP aka Accelerated Mobile Pages in email marketing is an integration (initially developed by Google) for a web page-like experience inside emails. It allows your marketing team to create interactive and dynamic digital experiences for your users within those emails and enhances engagement.
Using the power of AMP, you can directly embed interactive elements like image galleries, forms, carousels, etc. These components are what will make your users click and engage with you.
These elements also make it easier for the users to engage and interact without having to leave the inbox on a different app. This way, the results would lean towards higher engagement, improved customer experience, and increased brand visibility.
How to Leverage the Power of AMP in Your Email Marketing Strategy?
Here are some of the major benefits of AMP that you can get an advantage out of for your email marketing strategy:
Increase in Conversions
The longer a prospect takes to make a decision, the lower the likelihood of conversion. AMP email addresses this issue by allowing subscribers to complete transactions directly within the email itself, reducing decision-making time. This functionality proves instrumental in generating leads and increasing conversion rates, ultimately transforming prospects into customers.
Real-Time Updates
You can also include live, real-time updates in your emails using AMP. This feature was specifically developed for displaying real-time pricing, showcasing inventory availability, publishing event updates, and overall ensuring that your users get the correct and relevant information timely.
Personalization at Scale
Also, when you are using AMP, it allows the dynamic content to adapt to the user patterns and their interactions. This capability actually helps marketers for delivering personalized recommendations.
Such tailored experiences resonate with the users and eventually drive revenue for your business.
Now, let us explore how to best utilize AMP for your email marketing strategy.
Best Practices for Implementing AMP
When you are utilizing AMP, you need to leverage the maximum potential out of it to get the best ROI for your brand. How can you do that?
Get started with segmentation
In order to get the maximum impact of AMP for your email marketing strategy, you have to categorize emails into different groups based on various criteria, such as past purchase history, level of engagement, geographical location, and more.
This personalization tactic proves effective as it enables the delivery of valuable and pertinent messages to specific groups, fostering higher customer engagement and boosting email-driven conversions.
Use interactive elements
AMP provides a range of interactive components and elements and if used wisely and thoughtfully, they can make a significant impact. You must focus on the components that align with interactive emails, email marketing strategy, and objectives.
Forms: You can embed interactive forms within emails, allowing recipients to submit information, provide feedback, or participate in surveys and polls directly from the email.
Carousels: Carousels enable you to display multiple images or content blocks within a single space, allowing recipients to scroll or swipe through the carousel to view different offerings or information.
Accordion Menus: Accordion menus allow you to present collapsible content sections within an email. Recipients can expand or collapse these sections to access additional details or navigate through different sections of the email.
Countdown Timers: Countdown timers can be added to create a sense of urgency or to promote time-sensitive offers. These timers visually display the time remaining for a particular event or offer.
Ratings and Reviews: You can include interactive rating and review elements within emails, allowing recipients to provide feedback or rate products, services, or experiences directly from the email.
Continuously test and optimize
As with any process or strategy, even when you are using AMP, testing and optimization are crucial to the process. A/B testing, multivariate testing, and optimization through improvements are a must.
Through A/B testing, you can understand the impact of AMP components and elements on the open rates, click-through rates, as well as conversions. You can use the insights gained through testing for refining your approach.
By doing this, you can achieve continuous improvement in the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
Always provide support for non-AMP versions
There are email clients that do not support AMP. Here, you need to ensure that you have a fallback option. This way, the clients and recipients who are not compatible with AMP can also still access your content, and engage with your brand.
Always comply with the best practices and follow the guidelines
When it comes to using AMP, you have to comply with the guidelines set by the email service providers along with the AMP specifications. Ensure that the email client supports and enables AMP for email functionality. Not all clients may offer support for AMP (like Outlook and Amazon Simple Email Service), so it’s crucial to confirm compatibility beforehand.
This will ensure that the emails you send out as a part of your campaign are properly rendered, and compatible with the recipients, and improves client engagement by also following the best practices and guidelines.
Conclusion
Integrating AMP into your email marketing strategy can boost your engagement significantly. When you are leveraging the interactive capabilities of AMP, you are offering a dynamic, personalized, and immersive experience to your users.
Of course, it is important to always follow the best practices to get the maximum output out of AMP technology. AMP comes with a list of benefits that you must take advantage of for your email marketing strategy. By following the best practices, you ensure that it makes a significant impact on your brand.
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