Segmenting e-mail audience further to send less e-mail is good.
Sending an e-mail out that has a link like this isn’t.
Who is David Dalka - Twitter: @dalka
David Dalka is a digital business strategy professional experienced in realigning organizations to capture customer demand while improving margins. David is a business keynote speaker providing customized business strategy services and corporate executive retreats. David has been cited in the following business publications
Why is it not good? Please elaborate.
Hi Jim,
It’s great to learn that McKinsey is monitoring the blogosphere! It could lead to a good interview on how technology is not a tool, but strategic!
When I clicked on the e-mail, I’m greeted with the message, “Sorry! This page is for registered members only.”
When you are sending an e-mail of this type, why not send it with an auto-login? I don’t want to see a message like this, I have many passwords to keep track of and didn’t have it handy, so I abandoned the attempt. Stated a different way it should be lower effort, the client experience could be better (and with that your conversion rate would go up!)
What do you do for McKinsey Jim?
Thanks for listening.
Hi David,
Thanks for providing more detail. An auto login would smooth the process but also would pose a security risk.
We do permit our members to unsubscribe from single e-mail lists without logging in, but we consider it too risky to permit unauthenticated access to users’ full profiles. One must strike a balance between offering users’ convenience and protecting their privacy.
Note also that we do have a simple process to change your password in case you’ve forgotten it.
With regard to improving our conversion rate, our primary goal with this communication was to make our members aware of the fact that they have control over their e-mail subscriptions; focus groups revealed that many members did not know why they were getting e-mail from us, nor realized that they could tailor communications to their preferences.
It was our hope and expectation that this communication would encourage members to subscribe to more lists, as well as unsubscribe from topics of no interest to them. Based on early returns, the effort was an unqualified success; the number of new list subscriptions received was four times the number of unsubscriptions.
I oversee all technical design and development of mckinseyquarterly.com and I appreciate the opportunity to respond to your posting. I hope you’ll take advantage of our password-reset service and reauthenticate on the site — we haven’t seen you in more than a year!