270,000 New Direct Relationships Every Week for Firefox
This week the User Engagement and User Volunteer Community teams reached a significant milestone — we passed 15 million direct relationships for Mozilla Firefox.
It’s hard to believe that only a year ago, across all our user communication channels - we were talking in English only to around 4 million people. Today, more than five and half million people receive our monthly email newsletter in five languages; localized by our volunteer community team (with more on the way). And ten million other fans/followers are actively engaged in social (Facebook and Twitter) on a daily/weekly basis; sharing and liking our content throughout the world.
The trajectory has been amazing. Our average sign up rate for email last week was around 185,000 newsletter new subscribers, and around 95,000 new weekly fans for Facebook. That’s incredible growth!
We continue to drive these large growth numbers, however, engaging with our users in channel is the most important role of our team, and whereby we create force multipliers for reach and amplification of our brand. No matter how big your communication channel, if you’re not communicating effectively or maximizing your opportunities - it’s a wasted chance.
Email Marketers - relationships start at the very beginning
According to Matthew Kelleher, from Redeye: on the econsultancy blog “2010 was a year in which email marketers began to wake up to the fact that email is not purely a revenue driving media but rather a ‘customer communication channel’.” Its incredibly hard to believe that its taken so long for companies to realize this.
Heading up User Engagement at Mozilla you’ll say is an easier job if you know Mozilla is a non-profit, that our communication doesn’t need to convert to profit dollars, but we still want long term Firefox users and we use email as a channel to build relationships. The difference? We are interested in engagement, and that engagement is the path to a happy and healthy customer. The “mozilla & you“ newsletter provides tips and helpful advice, it only comes out once per month, and we’re very glad to see our readers are happy with the content and frequency. Open rates are around 25% and CTRs with 15% well above average.
Here are some email best practices we take pride in for the “mozilla & you” newsletter, sadly these are basic email operations which one doesn’t see that often anymore.
- At point of sign up, we ask HTML or Text — its an old-skool question, but people don’t ask anymore and people like choice.
- The Mozilla Privacy Policy is clearly pointed out also at sign up and in each email — how many times have you simply entered an email address for a newsletter, and have no idea if your email will be shared with third parties?
- In the Welcome email you can subscribe immediately, and we make it simple to unsubscribe from any email — how many emails do you get each day because the unsubscribe process was too complex and its easier to hit the delete key?
- An email subscriber can actually reply to the newsletter sender email address, and that email goes to a real person (often myself), and we try to help with inquiries wherever possible — email needs to be human, receiving it from a machine with a no-reply email address, doesn’t build a bond.
I would personally love to see email marketers (as well as creating engrossing content), take sign up and unsubscribe more seriously. Engagement stems from respect for the individual AND that starts at the beginning of the relationship.
Do leave a comment on your email experiences and other practices you believe email marketeers should observe
Consumer Education at Mozilla
Last month my colleague Richard Milewski wrote and published a number of artifacts surrounding the creation and use of safe passwords*. It’s part of the Mozilla Consumer Education project, where we began researching and learning about what new topics are of most interest to ordinary web users, and furthermore what types/formats of information best resonate with this audience (who I hope with all due respect, wont mind me calling not-so-web-literates).
It was a super interesting quarter, where we saw the simple password video comic Richard produced (with characters from Simon “Gee” Giraudot) picked up across media, with over 4.5M Impressions on Facebook and 80,000+ unique video views. As a relatively small test for us, this was a clear indication there is a great need for more of this type of information from content providers and the general public alike. **
Perhaps it’s no surprise that in our research from more than 40,000 respondents: security, online identity theft and managing ones social media profile were some of the greatest web concerns. And so, as we drive quickly into 2011, we’ll be doing as much as possible to provide web smart information to not only our 400M+ Firefox users, but also beyond that to any web user.
Educating and helping web users isn’t new at Mozilla, as an International non-profit with the user at the centre of our mission, we’ve been looking out for the man on the street (or web!) from the very beginning. What’s new here then? A number of things:
(i) more people are spending vast amounts of their time online
(ii) the web is constantly changing, and is not slowing down
(iii) there just isn’t that much web education out there
Nothing new in any of those points, but when you put them altogether you get vast amounts of people who are using the web for everything from dating, grocery shopping to online banking — and who are not web-smart, and therefore not really in control.
-
As mentioned this is something we want to change, and we’ll be providing much more web smart guides throughout 2011. And if you touch web users each day, I think we each have the obligation to help folks stay safe and in control of their online life, whilst having the best fun!
Let me know in the comments field of other web topics you hear people express concern or lack of knowledge about. Or if you’d like to help write any guides, we’d love to hear from you.
* Believe or not in Richard’s research there were plenty of very tech savvy folks who weren’t using great passwords — looks like we could all use a refresher!
** I was delighted to see Google also take consumer education forward last week with the launch of their beautifully made 20thingsilearned.com. There really is so much that we could and should all be doing. I have a good feeling that next year a whole lot more people are going to know more about the Web, and be more in control of their online life.
Book Review - The Referral Engine
I just finished reading ‘The Referral Engine” by John Jantsch, which I spotted it in the iBook store. It was published in May 2010, and according to Publishers Weekly is a ‘…thorough primer on the power of letting your products and customers speak for themselves.” I was curious to read how Jantsch suggested one should go about building word-of-mouth referrals, and of course as much of the success of Firefox was spread by satisfied and loyal user advocates, I was keen to see if I could learn something new.
The book goes over (starting from a basic level) all the steps one needs to think of when building a powerful brand, and creating consistent ways for people to engage with and refer your organization / company. I must admit that much of the book was not new to us here at Mozilla, but I found scores of interesting tidbits, which I’m going to look into further. The section on using technology to allow people to connect with you more deeply where and when they choose, however, balancing this with “hugs and handshakes” in real life really made me stop and think. Its going to be important for us to find more ways to connect online and offline people relationships. Jantsch raises many excellent points, and shows himself to truly understand the power and importance of customer experience.
He walks one through the ‘Ideal customer life cycle’ and the seven stages of referral development - all super helpful. And ends each chapter with a recap of actions to take.
I would wholly recommend this book for a wide variety of reasons…
1. To Start-ups: If you are a start-up this book with teach you right from the get go how to bake referral methods into your business, and you’ll shave dollars of your marketing budget.
2. For existing organizations and companies, read it to remind yourself of your customers and how they affect your brand. Remember you don’t own your brand, your customers do. If they are happy and delighted, they will tell others and you’ll have a long future ahead of you with loyal customers. You might not be asking you customers to refer you? Ask yourself why not? And make it easy for folks to share the great experiences they have.
3. For Mozilla, we’ve come so far and can be so grateful for the millions of referrals we’ve had over the years from around the globe. We’ve created great products and moved mountains for the Web, with our users being our largest advocates. Its all our job no matter what our function, paid staff, volunteers, partners to continue to create ways for people to share, advocate and lobby for a healthy Internet — and therefore why its important to use Firefox.
We’ll certainly be doing our best to find news ways for users and community spread the word. If you have ideas, please drop me a line / leave a comment.
And remember, creating something people want to connect with is key!
Mozilla has always been about Engagement, not Marketing
Engagement vs. Marketing?
Marketing, so the dictionary says, is: “… the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising”. But to Engage means to: “attract or involve, cause someone to be involved in, participate, establish a meaningful contact or connection…”.
Which one sounds right for Mozilla? Doesn’t take too much thought, right?
Engage is what we’ve always done. Together as a global community we have and continue to, attract millions of Firefox users, welcome participation and collaboration, build strong relationships, and carve a place in people’s hearts and minds. A non-profit attracting 400M+ Firefox users across the world, isn’t able to do that without people who quintessentially care about the Internet and People.
So what else can we do?
We think its important to further expand engagement, and especially with our users. Over the coming weeks and months we’re going to be examining and expanding the ways we connect with our Firefox users; increasing the ways people can connect, find product know-how and get to know the organization. At the same time, we want to create more, easy ways for people to get involved and participate in Mozilla. The project is already expanding to artists, film-makers, teachers and more, via the Drumbeat initiative. These are exciting times to involve as many people as possible in building a healthy Internet (and have fun!).
What can you do?
We would love your thoughts and input. Many of you reading this have been demonstrative in the building of the Mozilla movement this far, you are some of the most experienced people out there who know how to widen participation in the project and spread Firefox.
We’ve started a wiki page, and added some of the details about projects which we’ve started, there will and should be more. Please do reach out to myself, and others mentioned on the wiki if you would like to help, or find out more. We’ll all be posting more details soon, and would love to hear from you anytime for comments, ideas and help.
