Poor old Gordon Brown can’t take a trick.  Just 10 days from the UK election and he’s caught out by his lapel microphone.  After talking to Ms Gillian Duffy, a pensioner and “lifelong party party supporter,” on a campaign meet n’ greet he gets into his car, fumes in pique at the whole event and describes her as “a bigoted woman.”  And just when the Labour party had managed to put in doubt its complete annihilation, if not through its own efforts then at least through the efforts of Nick Clegg and David Cameron in the debates.

Jakob Nielsen, the web usability expert, has been conducting his own poll of the three major UK parties: to wit, of the quality of their campaign newsletters.  If you’re interested in web marketing, his latest Alertbox makes good reading.  He makes the following findings, amongst others.

Newsletters are very effective

… newsletters are a superb mechanism for growing a relationship with customers.  Indeed, when we recently asked users why they were visiting particular websites, the most common response was, “I was reminded to do so because I received an email newsletter from the site.”

When building a mailing list, remove distractions

The Labour Party signup page features the signup form plus thumbnails of Facebook fans.  As Nielsen says,

You almost captured the user’s email — but they decided to go off and gawk at some of your Facebook fans instead.

Only proceed!

Each page should show only those options that allow a user to proceed to a different stage or state.  It should not show options which, when clicked, just return the user to the “state they’re already in.”  For example,

… the homepage itself shouldn’t have a homepage link.

Use clear From and Subject fields in emails

Nielsen compares the confirmation emails received by people signing up on each of the three parties’ websites.  Here’s the Lib Dems’ message compared to the Labour Party’s:

From: Liberal Democrats, Subject: Thank you for signing up for Liberal Democrat email news

From: labourparty@email-new.labour.org.uk, Subject: Thank you for signing up

The Apple App Store has “atrocious findability”

Yes, the venerable Apple, according to Nielsen, is the only organisation whose official pages on Facebook and Twitter had worse “findability” than those of the UK parties.

*****

To read Nielsen’s findings in full, click here.

To watch the YouTube of Brown meeting the woman, click here: