Nick Usborne, author of Net Words has some great ideas for thank you emails to send when a visitor to your site does something that includes providing their email address.

Nick suggests:

1. Make them FEEL welcome, say Thank You.
   This has to do with tone and voice of the email. Don’t make your thank you email dry, bland and “all business�. Insert a personal voice. After all, they are a new customer or prospect. If you worked in a store or restaurant, wouldn’t you make some effort to make someone feel welcome when they walked through your door? Do the same with your email.
2. Encourage them to go back to your site right away.
   If they took an action that resulted in them giving you their email address, it means they are feeling good about your company or organization. Take advantage of that positive feeling and provide links back to the most popular and best performing pages on your site.
3. Reassure them by providing customer service or contact information.
   Demonstrate that you are trustworthy by providing contact information...help pages, email addresses and phone numbers. Above all else, a phone number and a personal email address (not info@blablawidgets.com) will reassure them that they really can contact you if they need to.

Day to day we tend to spend a great deal of time on promotional emails. "Housekeeping" emails don’t get much work or attention. We tend to write them quickly without enough thought to their potential. You can significantly increase the lifetime value of a new customer – or the chances of converting a prospect into a customer - by making the effort to make them feel genuinely welcome.

Talk about uninspiring, here's a personality-less Thank You email from Apple that I just got yesterday after signing up for the Apple Developer Connection:

SUBJECT: Thank You from the Apple Developer Connection
FROM: Apple Developer Connection

Dear Stephan Spencer,

Thank you for joining the Apple Developer Connection. We're pleased that you have chosen to become part of the dynamic and diverse community creating innovative products and solutions using Apple technologies.

Your ADC Member username is: ***********. This is also your Apple ID and it may be used, along with your password, to log in to the ADC Member Site and to access many other Apple services.

http://connect.apple.com

The Apple Developer Connection is here to support your success. Please visit our website to learn more about the benefits of ADC membership. If you have specific questions or if you would like to provide feedback on how we can better serve your needs, please contact us.

http://developer.apple.com/membership
http://developer.apple.com/contact

We look forward to helping you make the most of the Apple platform.

-- Your Apple Developer Connection Team

- - - - - - -

Copyright 2005 Apple Computer, Inc.

All Rights Reserved.

http://www.apple.com/legal/terms/site.html

Pretty "ho hum", eh? I'm a huge fan of Apple, and boy did they miss an opportunity to make a connection with me on this one. They hit the basics, but I expect more out of Apple. Going beyond Nick's advice above, here are some additional thoughts on what Apple could have done better here:

• Let Apple's passion for innovation come through. Sound excited!
• Make me feel like a special person: a member of an exclusive club
• Sign the email like a REAL person would! (with a standard sign-off like Cheers or Regards and a person's name)
• Connect me with other developers
• Regale me with success stories of Apple Developers hitting the big time
• Point me to the most popular ADC downloads
• etc.

A good creative brief is essential to a successful website development project. The creative brief lays out the proposed visual design directions to explore, the objectives of the upcoming creative exploration, the audience, the "story" the site should tell, the tone and imagery that the site should take on.

Nick Usborne, author of the excellent book Net Words, suggests in his most recent issue of the ExcessVoice newsletter that you incorporate the following elements into your creative brief:

1. Description of task
This needs to be a complete description of the writing task involved.

2. Background on product/company
The copywriter will usually NOT be as “up-to-speed� as the account management group. It is easy to assume the writer has in-depth knowledge that he or she does not have.

So it’s important that the writer is given “too much� background information on the client and the product or service being written about.

3. Audience description
The fastest way to undermine the ability of a copywriter to do a good job is to deprive him or her of a crystal clear image of the target audience.

The writer needs to feel an intimate understanding of what the audience wants, needs and desires. That understanding needs to be of a depth that it allows the writer to picture clearly and accurately an individual within the target group.

The writer should be able to close her eyes, see the person, picture his home and yard, know how he likes to spend his free time and understand what most excites and scares him in life.

4. Principal purpose of the communication
Again, this is extremely important. Many a well-written piece of advertising has failed to deliver, simply because the writer was never given a clear view of what that “deliverable� really was.

What is the principal purpose of this email, web page, newsletter?

The more precisely this question can be answered, the better the copywriter will be able to write a clear, sharp communication that stays on purpose from the first word to the last.

5. Timeline
Great copy cannot be written in an hour. The assimilation of background information, a growing understanding of the audience at the individual level and the process of writing itself is a creative process when done well. It takes time.

The first draft is never the best draft. Nor the second. As a result, copywriters need to be given sufficient warning of an upcoming job and be provided with enough time to do the job well.

Most web copy has no soul... it's mostly just personality-less drivel. Nick Usborne makes a great point in Net Words about how most newsletter subscription confirmations seem to be written by the same personality-less person and how a company's personality that comes through from the copy is the ONE differentiator that can't be easily ripped off (unlike the design, the offers, etc.)

In my long quest to find a FAQ or Help page that actually has personality, I've finally found one! From the ultra-clever folks at Mailinator. Have a peruse of Mailinator's FAQ. Here's an excerpt:

So if the government issued a subpeona to Mailinator to divulge emails or logs, you'd rat me out?

Holy crap, yes. I'm not going to jail for you, I have a boyish face and very (very) supple skin.