Life is grand

This deserves a lot more thought but I regularly here people saying “make your site sticky” or “get users back to your site” or “don’t let them go.”

because of the fact you are needing to “push” information to the user rather than the user taking action themselves. In the particular case where this is the majority of your traffic, it means your web product has failed to integrate itself in your user base’s life, and there isn’t a recurring set of traffic that you can depend on.

If you are getting 10 million visits a week and the majority come from your notifications then there is nothing wrong.

User retention: Why depending on notification-driven retention sucks has some good points but I think the quote above is too ardent. Yes, Facebook’s email notifications are awful. But Dopplr’s emails are very good, as are my build system and source control emails. The Carbon Account and Coudal Partner’s emails are excellent.

There are many sites out there doing a good job of integrating into my life by using emails and other notification systems.

There is a real obsession with bringing users back to our websites. There are other ways. I use Plaxo every single day and yet I rarely visit Plaxo.com. Dopplr works very well from afar and I can see it building more off-site services that benefit Dopplr and benefit me.

Yes, don’t do notifications like Facebook does. But if users never have to visit your site and interact with your service through notifications then I don’t see the harm (just make sure your business model still works.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 8:38 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.