Understanding Navigation Menus

Navigation menus are as important as any other element of your website. It acts as a doorway to your website, telling your visitors what to expect and where to go.

There are many styles available for navigation menus. You can use the classic hamburger menu for a compact feel, or the common one-row text menu for simplicity, or even the gigantic mega menu. But we should be careful choosing the right style for our menu as it might be a burden rather than a solution to our website performance.

We must remember that menu items should include links to the most important information on your website. We must know the significant difference between being informative and overloading.

When using text menus, we recommend sticking between four to six menu items. More than that will definitely confuse visitors on where to go, overcrowding the white space intended for a clean navigation.

Hamburger menus for desktop websites, on the other hand, tend to confuse users as well which results in misunderstanding that often leads to visitor frustration and leaving prematurely. This decreases your chances of conversion. Hamburger menus misses out on important data and remember that those extra few clicks are damaging as well. It is better to leave these kind of menus for mobile.

Mega menus also pose frustration as those who use this type of menu tend to overload them with too much information.

We must keep in mind the following when creating a navigation menu:

• Communicate what a website is about
• Provide easy access to top content or products
• Provide easy access to things you want users to see or engage with

Slack-Giphy-Facebook Update

Don’t get confused, this section acts as a 3-in-1 news article. We had an interconnected update between Giphy, Slack, and Facebook.

Let’s start with update number 1; Slack adds Giphy to their chatrooms! That’s right, Slack and Giphy teamed up to bring the ever colorful GIFs into Slack chatrooms. No need for any dev work to add GIFs to your messages now. To activate, simply type /giphy hello into any slack chats. From there you can call any GIFs from giphy by simply typing /giphy and a keyword of your liking. Slack uses Giphy Translate, it is the first “text-to-GIF” translation service. This means you can produce a GIF from words and complete phrases!

This brings us to update number 2; Facebook buys Giphy. Yup, Facebook just finished shopping and among its items on the cart is Giphy, the popular GIF hosting platform. As to date, Giphy announced that it will integrated with the Instagram team. There are no clear reports as to how much Facebook bought Giphy, but there are circulating hypothesis and suggestions that the market price was around $400 million. Chaching! Don’t worry devs and eery kind of users in the wild, Vishal Shah, VP of Product at Instagram, said Giphy will continue to operate its library. Everyone will still have the same level of access to the Giphy API pre-purchase from the social media giant. But beware, Facebook records show that it wants all its assets and products to be able to share data with each other, so there might be a privacy issue in the long run. Better observe if the company will hold their end of the bargain.

And for the final update; Facebook releases Avatars. No, not the blue beings from James Cameron’s masterpiece, and definitely not the air, water, fire, earth bending saviour that saved the animé but not the live-action movie. An Avatar is a “Bitmoji-esque cartoon lookalikes users can make of themselves”. If you want to make a mini version of you then this is pretty close. But for now, the update was rolled for users in the US. If you wish to use Avatars, and if the update is available for you, simply go to Messenger and click the sticker button next to the text button. There should be a “Make Your Avatar” option if it rolled out to you.

When to Send Emails During Today’s Pandemic

According to campaign monitor, there is a significant change in email reading behavior among our audience since the pandemic hit. Before the pandemic, it has been good practice to send out campaigns in a scheduled manner, with time slots ranging from 10 AM to luch time, to conclusive emails by the end of the day. This has usually been effective since our clients are being productive at around 10 AM after our usual morning routines, and after lunch time when we take a break from the day’s stretch and finally at home when all work has been done.

But this pattern has changed when COVID-19 came along. Schedules have been changed as life, it its normalcy, have changed as well. Work and places in general have been closed down, leaving most of us at home. With this in place, our old routine has changed and campaign monitor did an insight on how this scheduled activities changed.

Based on their study, the previous 10 AM spike in email sends and opens have changed to an earlier time of 9 AM, now that most of us are just at home and are not on the rush to move. This is followed by a tail, which is explained by the possibility of everyone being busy at home, doing all the chores needed or home-schooling the kids. The next spike, or spikes according to the study happens after lunch, running its course towards the afternoon. This is explained by the possibility of not having to do anything now in the afternoon. This also mirrors other home internet usage data studies during the past month. Previous to March, evening data download volumes were consistently higher than during daytime hours.According to this Statista study, this has now been turned on its head. Likewise, data usage during the workday (9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.) has ballooned 34.4% based on data from OpenVault.

As a takeaway, users are now more active during daylight hours, receiving more emails, and engaging to it more and longer. At the end of the day, activity slows down after March, after doing most of the engagements in the afternoon.

More than ever, think about your audience and what their days, lives, and environments look like when deciding on send time, content, and design. Our world is changing, and marketers and communicators must change alongside it.

Retention Emails to Reduce Customer Churn

Customer retention emails in email marketing refers to campaigns sent that reintroduces your brand to customers past or re-engage with those who have gone inactive, while customer churn is the percentage of subscribers who opted out of your email list. Here are great retention email ideas to lessen customer churn:

• Create an engaging welcome email and definitely send one. Not only should your welcome emails be content juicy, make sure you send one. Remember that your clients expect to receive one right after signing up or opting into your offers.
• Send out Thank You Emails as well. Don’t be confused between thank you emails and welcome emails. While can send a thank you in your welcome email after purchase, since it is needed to at least thank a client who purchased, you can send thank you emails to people who provided a feedback, for referring a friend, or even a simple appreciation worthy action from a client.
• Personalized Emails. There is nothing more engaging than emails that directly interact with the client. Expect clients to churn when your emails look like an automated content sent out by an automation email. Be more personal and connect with your audience. You can take advantage of holidays, send out greetings to your clients during these festive times to easily connect with everyone.
• Re-engaging Emails. When you build out your list, and notice that engagement is on the decline, send out emails for inactive users. Send a survey, or a simple we miss you email, a special incentive, or a “what you missed” email newsletter of the previous updates on your brand. These kinds of email tries to revitalize an inactive user to bring back interest to what he or she opted to. Remember that it costs more to find a new subscriber than to re-engage one.
• Activity emails are a must. We already tackled that our customer appreciation is imperative to keeping them engaged. There is nothing more appreciative than sending out greetings to your customers be it their birthday or their anniversary with your brand. These messages are wonderful for celebrating your subscribers/customers and allows you a chance to thank them for their time and loyalty, while also giving you a chance to share special incentives to encourage activity on their end.