I use a variety of online services, and here’s how most of you send emails.
Amazon: 7 emails from 3 senders for one order (auto-confirm@amazon.in, Amazon.in, order-update@amazon.in). Note: These are all for a single order with multiple items. And I’m not counting bank alerts here.
Flipkart: 4 emails from 2 senders for one order (no-reply@flipkart.com, cs@flipkart.com)
Stayzilla: 5 emails from 5 senders for one booking (ananth@stayzilla.com, orders@stayzilla.com, happystay@stayzilla.com, assist@stayzilla.com, no-reply@ccavenue.com)
RedBus: 4 emails from 3 senders for one booking (ticketmaster@redbus.in, noreply_feedback@redbus.in, insurance24x7@icicilombard.com)
OlaCabs: 2 emails from 1 sender for one booking. Lowest of them all and uses only 1 sender, but still there’s are two problems to be noted later.
The screenshots from my mobile are even worse. You folks are practically spamming my inbox. And you got here because of,
Overlooking email etiquette.
Email has something called threads. You can have the same subject and keep sending emails, they will clump together. What is one simple order to me, can be a thousand different processes for you, but I don’t give batshit! To me its ONE order, and I want all emails related to that order in one thread. I don’t want to hunt around for every email related to this separately. The smallest spammer in this list — OlaCabs — even they can do better by grouping emails in a thread.
Some may argue that people read only the subject and not the actual emails. So you send multiple emails with the subject telling everything — “Order X delivered”, “Order X failed”, etc. Firstly, its stupid to try to fit a long message in the subject. Check the Flipkart and Stayzilla emails — they don’t even fit in the first place, and vital information is overflown and hidden!
But this is also 2015. Every email client from Desktop to Mobile shows a snippet near the subject. If you keep the subject small and succint, your snippet should be able to tell everything that I need in one glance!
Interestingly, your SMS messages are in fact tolerable, simply because all text messengers group messages by phone number! Its got nothing to do with your foresight.
Not doing UX on your mails.
Your email subjects sometimes look a lot like Application debug logs. Did you accidentally wire your log aggregator to the emailer? Some weird, long ID with cryptic text. The Order IDs from Amazon, Flipkart and Stayzilla are 20 characters or more! What the hell — is that really how I can recognize my order in an email?
OlaCabs subject says “Confirmed: CRN <random number>”. What is that even supposed to mean to me? And in most cases, the Order ID is so long that any useful information that you tried to cram into the subject gets overflowed! Check Flipkart’s email.
Most of the emails also have redundant subjects. “From: amazon.in, Subject: Your amazon.in order…”. Really, am I going to order FlipKart through Amazon? Or is it going to be some random stranger’s order instead of mine? What’s really the purpose of “Your amazon.in …” in the subject when the mail is addressed From: Amazon and To: Me?
How about,
From: Amazon, Subject: Order X, Y and 4 more
From: Stayzilla, Subject: Hotel X 24–28 Nov
From: OlaCabs, Subject: Ride from <pickup>
Oh just how refreshingly simple and readable that would be. Use small user-readable subjects and intelligent message bodies, so that in the end the Subject+Snippet comes out great. Learn to work with modern email clients and form factors rather than working against them.
Lack of a communication policy.
The Technical division sends out some emails. Then the Delivery and Fulfillment division. And finally comes in the Customer Support division with their own email barrage. Not to mention third-party vendors. Problem is worse with the vendors because, they have no context of the user’s activity, so they put their internally generated IDs in the subject which are totally unrelated to the Order IDs in your subject!
Sit down and talk together. Come up with a Communication policy that includes Email, SMS, IVRS and any other medium. Involve third parties (payment providers, insurance providers, etc) wherever you can, and make them part of the policy — they should also be using subjects and threads targeted at the end user.
Remember, Email is still the greatest communication medium.
And there are only two parties here: Me and You. It shouldn’t be that hard to communicate from You to Me, right?
