Some things just cannot be undone.
How many wrong, dumb, or intentionally hurtful things have left our lips that we wish we could get back the moment they’re spoken? I know there have been plenty of those times for me, and I’m sure there will be many more.
Even more wild, sometimes, are moments when we say or do the wrong thing without even realizing it and don’t hear about it for days, weeks, months, or years. We don’t hear about it in time to stop the bleeding, so to speak. We’ve unknowingly used a hurtful tone, or phrase with a hidden meaning, or misrepresented someone.
On top of that, add the pressure of representing a company. If something goes haywire, not only is your own reputation on the line, but the company’s is, too. Your boss might be upset. Customers might leave. Stakeholders could demand someone more “responsible” grab the reins.
Embedded Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
As dramatic as it sounds, that can be the backdrop to someone hitting “Send” on a company email campaign. Once email is gone, it’s gone gone. Even if you realize within minutes, the best you can usually do is send a quick follow-up to the same people to set the record straight. And now you’ve stuffed peoples’ inbox with two emails, looking quite unprofessional.
It’s a scary moment! In a presentation on MailChimp’s voice and tone, Kate Kiefer Lee talks about this moment, and how it led to very particular copy accompanying their big, final “Send” button.
Now, take that context of sending things that cannot be undone and multiply it by however many actions you might take inside an automated marketing campaign. Interaction with one email can set off a chain reaction of further emails, CRM actions, prospect tagging, and more. This is the power of marketing automation and some of its truest value. By structuring these campaigns well, you can fill up a sales pipeline (or move people through it) with efficiency only dreamed of before. Yet, the pressure of getting everything just right can be extreme, and setting things in motion can be scary.
Pressing one of the most important buttons in a product I work on can be scary. Taking the most valuable action can easily be done while feeling fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
The problem is that we all can easily miss that as people working on our products. We’re excited to share the power of a feature, but we can often miss the places where users are taking important steps from a place of fear.
Uncovering Moments
At Dreamforce this year, we got to show off some of the cool stuff we’ve been working on at Pardot. One of those awesome new things is Nurture Studio, which is our reimagined builder for lead nurturing (and other types of automation). One component that got folks excited was a testing interaction where you can walk through your own campaign as if you were one of the people you’re sending to. It’s the most obvious place where we’ve chosen to fight embedded FUD for our users, but that approach is interwoven throughout the entire experience. Everything from the building interface to the reporting was designed for empowerment.
We knew we were on target after conversations with folks at Dreamforce who said it was “crazy awesome”. The thing is, we were already pretty sure we were on target, because we started the entire process by talking to users and finding ways to empower them.
We chose to spend time interviewing users before we designed a single thing or made any decisions. In those interviews, we were able to expose the areas that make people unsure of themselves instead of only trying to fish for desired enhancements.
As it turns out:
- People often have a hard time quickly understanding what they’re looking at in visual workflow builders because there are so many similar things to look at and so many directions it can all go in.
- People doubt that they put the right assets in the right places.
- People doubt that the automation will start and stop at the right times.
- People doubt that they will know when an accident does happen and will be unable to course-correct.
We could be pompous and assume that those doubts are inevitable in powerful applications—many companies do. It’s easier to talk about fancy features than conquering user doubt. But we choose to empower people instead of focusing our tools, which pays off in the long run.
Instead of experiencing negative emotions when interacting with key components of our product, people experience the positive feeling of confidence and excitement. People enjoy what used to terrify them. People are able to focus on what they do best (like content or marketing flows), instead of focusing on preventing massive errors.
It’s not an easy approach, but it’s the one that modern applications should take. Make your users feel like absolute, unwavering champions of what they do and they’ll do better work for their company—and they’ll be much more likely to keep paying you to help them do it.