Governments need to ensure their websites work for modern users

I went to the Australian Business Register site (www.abr.gov.au) this afternoon to set up an ABN (Australian Business Number) for a company.

This is a very common step, taken by hundreds, if not thousands, of Australians every week.

However I immediately hit a speed bump.

The site's online ABN registration process threw up an error message (image below) stating:

Browser not supported

The Australian Business Register currently supports the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 5.0 and above
• Netscape 6.0 and above

You should update your browser version before you continue using the Australian Business Register. If you believe your current browser is suitable to use, please continue.

Refer to Technical Information for details on how to configure for your browser for the Australian Business Register.

This was confusing and offputting as I was using Firefox 11.0 - one of the most modern web browsers available.

Fortunately I had Internet Explorer 9 on my system and gave this a try - no error screen appeared.

Now if you read far enough into the error message it does state that 'If you believe your current browser is suitable to use, please continue.' - however I was in a hurry at the time and, like many users, didn't read the error message all the way through.

The error message visible at the Australian Business Register site,
together with the 'About' information window for the web browser in use

Regardless of whether this translates into a user error, I believe that there is an obligation on government agencies to ensure their websites are accessible and usable in modern web browsers without unnecessary and confusing error screens.

Essentially, when I have Firefox 11.0, I don't expect to receive an error stating I need 'Internet Explorer 5.0 and above' or 'Netscape 6.0 and above' - as my web browser is "above" both and, in fact neither of those web browsers have been current for more than 10 years!

For such an important and common business process as registering an ABN the responsible agency needs to take a little more care in its online delivery of services.

Otherwise their online services will damage trust and respect in the government's ability to deliver and cause customers to migrate to what are slower and (for agencies) higher cost channels.

I'll bring this issue to the attention of the responsible agency, the Australian Tax Office, and check back in six months to see if anything has changed.

For all other government agencies out there, please check that your public online systems aren't needlessly damaging your credibility in this way. Please make sure your websites work for modern users!

Read full post...

View summary...

Online Community Management survey launches for Australia and New Zealand

Quiip and Delib Australia have launched the first online community management survey for Australia and New Zealand.

The survey aims to help local organisations and individuals better understand the skills required to work in these professions, help uncover role challenges, training and support needs and the actual work and salaries that online community management and social media management professionals can expect.

The results of the survey will be presented at Swarm later this year and then released online as a free report.

The survey was inspired by The Community Roundtable's 2012 State of Community Management report, which drew from a largely US audience and asked a limited set of questions.

Tha Australian and New Zealand Community Management survey will be open for responses until 19 May.

For more information visit Quiip's site at http://quiip.com.au/online-community-management-2012-survey.

To complete the survey go to www.citizenspace.com/app/delib-au/cmsurvey or click on the button above.

Note: I'm involved in the design and management and will be involved in the analysis and reporting for this survey. The goal is to provide information that organisations can use to design community management and social media management roles and to help identify the training and support individuals working in these professions require to be most effective.

Read full post...

View summary...

Remove PDFs from your site to save money and increase traffic by 160x - the experience of the Vic Department of Primary Industries

While there may now be accessibility techniques for PDFs, this doesn't mean that the format is necessarily the most appropriate for displaying information on the web and attracting usage, as the Victorian Department of Primary Industries discovered when they removed all PDFs from their website and converted them to web pages.


As reported in thw case study, Unlock valuable content trapped in PDFs from BriarBird (as brought to my attention by Gian Wild's blog), the Department of Primary Industries Systems and Technical Manager Mark Bryant found that, 

“As we converted more and more PDFs to HTML/web format, the stats just kept going up and up until we reached around 1.6 million extra page views per year – it was fantastic.”

Mark also said in the case study that,

“Our users were telling us they wanted to do things in a different way, and when we converted a few PDFs to web pages we found the web pages outperformed PDF by as much as 160 to one.

“Initially we tried to create a web page to match each PDF, but in the end we introduced a blanket rule – no PDFs as it was far too difficult to manage both formats,” Mark said.

“There was some resistance, but the business case is pretty simple when you can show that a web page is being read around 160 times more often than a PDF.

“If you are spending money preparing content for the web, then that money is essentially being wasted if that content is locked up in a format people are unwilling to use.”

Over the last ten years I've also consistently noticed a ratio of 100:1 or more for views to webpages vs PDFs in the websites I've managed.

While PDFs often suit content creators (who are used to MS Word), they are rarely the best format for online content recipients - your audience.

If your organisation is focused on having the customer at the centre it is worth reviewing your content creation and distribution approach to ensure it aligns with customer needs.

For example, where a printable version is required, it is possible to achieve this with a print template for web pages using style sheets (CSS) rather than with a PDF. In effect when people click 'print' the web page is automatically reformated for A4 printing. This makes updating much faster and easier as you only have to maintain one version of the content.

So why not save PDFs for when they are most needed and wanted and ensure that the majority of your content is 'native' using web pages. Your audiences will love you for it.

Read full post...

View summary...

Australian government agencies achieving the highest click-throughs of all sectors for email marketing campaigns

I've been browsing the latest Email Market Matrics Australia report from Vision6 and it definitely has good news for government agencies.

This series of reports has been running since the second half of 2006 and has, for me, provided a very useful insight into the effectiveness of email marketing in Australia over the last five years.

The reports are based on data from Vision6, so there's a slight bias based on being a single vendor (competitors such as CampaignMonitor don't yet release similar reports, or combine their information into a single industry report). However it is based on 259 million messages distributed via 112,000 separate campaigns by predominantly Australian companies (and they exclude all emails sent by  stand alone resellers and corporate networks) - so it is a large sample for reporting purposes.

Vision6's software (similar to its competitors) tracks email campaigns by sends, bounces, email opens and click throughs (to links in email messages).

This provides very useful ROI data for agencies. I have always tried to encourage agencies to use these types of tools to manage their email newsletters so they can properly report on them and detect user sentiment and trends (this also takes the load off the, often overburdened, email systems used by government agencies).

The cost of these products is quite low considering their capabilities - particularly when looking at A/B testing to identify the most effective newsletter format and content (by sending differently formated emails to several small subsets of your email list, comparing open rate/click throughs and then distributing the most effective email format to the full list).

I'm not aware of any agencies who do currently use A/B testing for either email or websites, though this is widely used by business to maximise ROI - however I live in hope.

Back to the Vision6 survey and its results - the latest July-December 2011 survey reports that  government agencies and defense have retained their position as achieving the highest open rate of any industry sector in Australia, with 31.66% of emails opened by recipients (an increase of 0.97% from last survey).

This means that if, as a government agency,  you send out an email to a 10,000 person list, on average 3,166 of them will be opened. The others will end up deleted, ignored, blocked or bounced (where email addresses are full or closed).

While this doesn't sound great, it's actually a much higher exposure level than achieved through other mediums. It's also a much better rate than for many other industries, such as construction (20.99% open rate) or sales and marketing (14.79% open rate).

It is also important to consider that smaller lists tend to achieve higher open rates - perhaps due to the additional effort in managing the integrity of larger lists.

By send volume, on average across all industries, lists with under 500 subscribers achieve a 33.17% open rate, dropping to 19.76% for lists with more than 10,000 subscribers.


Government also topped the unique clickthrough rates for all sectors, with 8.42% of subscribers clicking through from the email to further information on a website. This compares to the bottom-place IT and Telecommunications sector, which only received a unique clickthrough rate of 2.25%.

The average clickthrough rate for all sectors was 4.22%, although this also declined by list size (from 7.31% for up to 499 subscribers down to 4.07% for lists of 10,000 or more.

Government also did well on bounce rates, with only 4.43% of emails not getting through. Whilest not the lowest rate, which is held by the Call Centre/Customer service sector with 3.29%, government was third highest and much, much better than the 15.27% bounce rate suffered by the Science and Technology sector, or 10.47% by the Manufacturing/Operations sector.

The average bounce rate was 5.45% and, interestingly bounce rates didn't consistently increase with larger lists.

Vision6's report indicated that lists with under 500 subscribers received, on average, a bounce rate of 5.28%. However lists with more than 10,000 subscribers received a marginally lower 5.26%. There was a bump in the middle however, with lists of 5,000-9,999 receiving 6.07% bounces and lists with 500-999 and 1,000-4,999 reaching 5.90% and 5.70% respectively.

The time taken to open email addresses appears to be falling, with 29.46% opened in the first 24 hours and 90.72% in the first 72 hours. Vision 6 reports that this last figure has increased consistently onver the last five years.

So, finally, what about the email clients used by people? This is important as emails can be distorted, or even unreadable, if the email client doesn't correctly display it.

While the majority of government agencies use Outlook or Lotus Notes email, this isn't the case in the broader world.

When looking at the email clients used by people opening received emails (an average of 21.83% of emails sent), Outlook accounted for 43.54% of clients (22.24%, 14.90% and 6.40% for Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010 respectively).

Hotmail accounted for another 16.21% and iPhone Mail accounted for 15.14% of email clients (and iPad Mail for another 3.7%) - demonstrating how strong mobile email has become - followed by Apple Mail at 11.98%.

'Other' received 20.11% - which included a range of services such as Gmail, Lotus Notes and others. I would like to see Vision6 really break this out further - however individual agencies can do this if using this type of email management platform.

There's clearly a strong need for organisations to understand how their subscribers receive and view emails as there can need to be important design differences depending on the client - even between different versions of the same product (such as for Outlook).

In conclusion, government in Australia already appears to be using email marketing well - at least when they are using email management systems such as Vision6, it's harder to judge email lists that don't use a management and reporting tool.

However there always remains room to learn from the figures and further improve the design and cut-through of email newsletters - particularly as mobile email continues to strengthen.

Email is still a very strong channel for reaching people with information, particularly in older demographics where social media engagement is less, and should be a core plank of any government communication strategy.

Remember that an email list is an organisational asset. People who have agreed to receive information from you are far more likely to engage and influence others. Don't squander and destroy this asset through poorly considered email strategies, which may include too frequent, too irregular or too 'boring' email updates.

Use approaches like A/B testing to determine what layout and headlines get the most cut-through, improving your ROI, and keep an eye on what people click on to see what types of information or stories hit the mark.

Email marketing is a science, there's plenty of evidence available on what works and cost-effective quantitative measurement tools for tracking and tweaking your own email newsletters.

Don't waste the opportunity by ignoring the evidence, or destroy the ROI by not measuring, reporting and adjusting.

Read full post...

View summary...

Australia goes mobile - 47% of net connections via mobile devices

It's long been reported that the majority of internet connections in Japan are via mobile devices - since 2006 in fact.

It now seems Australia is on the verge of following the same path, with the ABS reporting that as at 31 December 2011, 47% of internet connections in Australia were via mobile devices.

The report, (8153.0 - Internet Activity, Australia, Dec 2011), has some other interesting findings as well...

• The number of internet connections grew by 11.0% in the year to 31 December, and by 6.3% since the end of June 2011.
• Mobile wireless grew fastest, with a 14.7% increase since the end of June 2011.
  
• The number of dial-up connections continued to decline, to 475,000 - still a substantial number, but representing only 4% of the total 11,596,000 internet connections in Australia. Of those 379,000 (3.2%) were households, the rest businesses. 
• The number of dial-up connections declined 17.9% (from 579,000 to 475,000) since June 2011.
  Note the ABS state the decline was 16.7% - I don't know why our calculated figures differ.

• More Australians remain on connection speeds less than 8Mbps (55%), however a good proportion are on 8-24Mbps (34.3%). Only 0.3% are on connections greater than 100Mbps.

• The total data downloaded was 345,518 Terabytes (or 345,518,000 Gigiabytes) for the three months ending 31 December 2011. This was an increase of 26% since June 2011 (remember the number of connections only grew by 6.3% so we're all downloading more). 
• The average downloaded per connection was 29.8 Gigabytes (Gb) for the three months so, on average, we download 10Gb per month.
• However dial-up users only downloaded, on average, 67 Megabytes (Mb) of data per month, while broadband users downloaded an average of 10.3 Gb of data - showing a massive difference in usage.

• There were 91 ISPs in Australia with more than 1,000 subscribers - remaining a competitively very robust market.

There is a clear paradigm shift for users when upgrading to dial-up to broadband, with usage increasing by over 15,000%.

This representing a change from email and basic web browsing to the use of the internet as a multi-media interactive entertainment, engagement and service delivery environment.

It will be interesting to see the the paradigm shift in usage from users on fixed internet connections to mobile. I believe this is even greater as the services relevant to mobile users are very different to those relevant to static users.

Perhaps we can take another lead from Japan on this, based on the use of mobile internet during and following their recent tsumani.

Or learn from these five cities benefiting from mobile apps.

Read full post...

View summary...