Articles
How to Get Buy-in for Conversion Rate Optimization
I just arrived home from San Francisco where I attended the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit. As always, it’s great to catch up with friends and participate in enlightening conversations. A key theme of my presentation: how to get organizational buy-in to testing and conversion optimization.
Marketers often get so worked up about the prospect of optimization and persuading more customers that we forget something. Before we can pursue optimization, we must convince those in our own company about optimization’s value.
Here, then, are some tips for convincing executives, coworkers, teammates, and anyone else in your company of the importance of investing in marketing optimization, analytics, and conversion improvement efforts.
Get the Math Right
When you present your numbers, don’t assume your listeners are getting the math right:
- 100,000 people visit your Web site
- 3 percent of people convert into a desired outcome
- Your site gets 3,000 total conversions
What happens when you increase conversion rate by 1 percent? How many total conversions does your organization hear?
- 3,030
- 4,000
Translate All Numbers Into Dollars
Another dangerous assumption to make is that your listeners can translate numbers into dollars. Always show impact in terms of dollars. Use average order value (AOV) or average lead value (for lead-generation or registration sites).
Let’s say your AOV is $50 and your company spends $200 for every 1,000 visits. For those 1,000 visits, your conversion rate is 2 percent, which equals 20 actions. For every 1,000 visits, you gross $1,000 in sales (calculate: $50 AOV x 20 actions = $1,000 in gross sales). If you increase your conversion rate modestly to 3 percent, your gross sales increase is 50 percent, or $500 per 1,000 visits (calculate: 3 percent x 1,000 visits = 30 actions; 30 actions x $50 AOV = $1,500 in sales).
It’s also helpful to show the dollar impact over an entire quarter or a fiscal year.
Oftentimes companies have a hard time determining AOV or average lead value with any degree of accuracy; that’s OK. Of course, the cleaner your data, the easier it will be to have organizational buy-in. The key is to show some sort of monetary value. We often encourage our clients to make a conservative estimate that most in the company will agree on.
Leverage Your Reach
Show your team the advantage of taking control of the visitor instead of existing solely at the mercy of visitor traffic.
With an AOV of $50 and a modest conversion rate increase from 2 percent to 3 percent (50 percent), the sales increase is impressive, but that’s only one part of the story. In the table below, you can see the impact of increasing both conversion and traffic:
In the “good” column, you get more from the traffic and spend. Your CPA (define) goes down, and you generate more profit from your advertising. You won’t grow faster, but you make more.
Let’s say you reinvest some of those dollars into acquisition spend to drive more traffic. You can grow exponentially and outspend your competition, you can even afford for the conversion rate to go down a bit. Your conversion and traffic increase rockets your growth dramatically.
This advantage of conversion rate optimization is often missed or overlooked by many companies.
With a conversion rate increase, you now have a choice:
- Use incremental profits to expand reach: 133,000 visits x 4% conversion rate = 5,320 orders
- Lower your marketing acquisition costs. If your acquisition cost was $100 per action, with this efficiency it would now be $66 per action.
Again, even with modest increases in conversion companies can begin to wean themselves off addictive traffic or make their traffic work harder for them instead of working harder for traffic.
Is There a Catch?
While there are many tools to aid marketers in their quest, there’s still no conversion rate black box. Conversion optimization always require resources and effort, trial and error, and sometimes sweat and tears. And it never ends. Optimization is a continual process of gaining customer insight, implementing changes, testing, then starting the whole process over.
The Bottom Line
You can’t always control the amount of visits, but you can control what you present to visitors. Why not optimize it?
Still have doubts? Ask yourself: what would it cost you to double traffic (if this is even possible) versus doubling conversion rate?
*Article cross-posted on ClickZ
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Editor’s Note: Want an even easier way to get buy-in for conversion optimization? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar. Today (May 9th) is the last day to take advantage of the early registration discount for the Call to Action and Persuasive Online Copywriting seminars, so hurry up and make your business case for the trip. It’s a lot easier to convince management when you can save up to $300 off the price of admission.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Facebook Ads Prove That “Targeting” Demographics Is Silly
Social media advertising isn’t just another fad. With all of that juicy customer info we give social networks each day, for free, businesses of all sizes are lining up to cash in by offering the right ad to the right person, guaranteed — or so they think.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Here’s the promise Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, made to media buyers last November:
With Facebook you will be able to select exactly the audience you want to reach, and we will only show your ads to them. We know exactly what gender someone is, what activities they are interested in, their location, country, city or town, interests, gender [etcetera, etcetera] . . .
Several months later, this is the result:
Apparently, David at Broccoli & Cheese wasn’t a good target for this ad:
As you read this, thousands of 18-34 year old men are watching Tampax commercials. Not because they want to, but because television is an imprecise medium that makes it hard to get the right ads to the right people. As a result, we’ve been conditioned over decades to expect irrelevance at the commercial break.
But wasn’t the Internet, and in particular, social media, supposed to turn that tide? Take Facebook—they know more about my day-to-day life than my parents do, and surely enough to serve me ads that I’d find remotely useful. But they’re dropping the ball. Big time.
[…] Will someone out there besides Google please get their [expletive] together?
If MarineCFO’s Chief Financial Officer is reading this, chance are s/he’s not thrilled with Facebook.
To be clear, I don’t think MarineCFO was silly to place this ad. It’s just that, like me and perhaps even you, we’re easily seduced by the promise of demographics. We like to think it’s sufficient.
Demographics are like catnip for marketers.
They make being wrong feel so right. They always seem to have the right answer. They help us justify lazy decisions. They give us such wonderful opportunities to prejudge our audience — specifically, how they define themselves and what they want to hear, see or read — based on a few scant details. Yet by themselves, demographics can never be accountable for anything because they’re based on correlation, not causality.
Marketers, and the advertising platforms that prey on them, need to look beyond the logistics of ad placement and stop thinking of “targeting” as a one-way, two-dimensional process. Demographics are important, but without the context of psychographics [define], they’re quite often useless. To paraphrase Mark Twain, to a media buyer armed with vague demographic data, everyone looks like a target.
I wonder where and how these ads would have been placed had they planned the campaign with personas.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Website Optimization vs. Redesign: The UFO Metaphor
Who would throw away a perfectly good UFO house?
That’s exactly what happened in Taiwan more than 20 years ago, as you can see from these Flickr photos.
Wow. An entire resort filled with UFO-style houses.
Abandoned.
Seeing this made me think of the websites that are abandoned each day, each quarter, by businesses that decide they need to redesign instead of enduring the less glamorous process of website optimization.
According to one blog, there are a several rumors as to why the “UFO house” resort in Sanjhih was abandoned. One story suggests that someone was killed there and the resort is haunted. Another is that the Taiwanese government outlawed bathing beaches in the area. But the most believable explanation is that the design was impractical; the resort is in a remote, windy area near the sea, and if the houses are indeed made of fiberglass as it appears, it would get incredibly hot in the summertime.
Form without function is art, not business.
In August of last year, Internet Retailer’s Form and Function survey of “243 chain retailers, catalog companies, virtual merchants and consumer brand manufacturers,” and found that…
60.3% . . . have redesigned their e-commerce sites in the past year, including 20.1% in the past three months and 14.3% within six months. Of the retailers planning to overhaul the look of their web sites, 74.7% expect to do so within 12 months and 28.6% within 90 days.
[…] “The pace of web site design is brisk because more retailers know that having an attractive site that makes it easy to find merchandise and make a purchase is a competitive advantage,” says Joey Lechtner, director of e-marketing services for Fry Inc., an Ann Arbor, Mich., web site design and e-commerce development company. “Retailers ‘keep up with the Jones’ [sic] and if their competitor redesigns a site, they notice and take action.”
A costly redesign? Just to keep up with the neighbors? What if these earthlings — these so-called “Joneses” — take their design cues from outer space? Sure, there are times when a website redesign makes sense, but if you plan it with human visitors in mind in the first place, redesigning each year would seem crazy.
And let’s face it. Maybe you don’t need a redesign. Maybe you just need to recognize that you’ve built a cool-looking-yet-impractical UFO house that would be fine if you just painted it white and installed solar panels, reflective glass and an air conditioner.
That’s my website optimization metaphor and I’m sticking to it. For now.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Are Your Analytics Reports Breaking News or Listing Facts?
I have a friend who works in the online marketing department for a multi-million-dollar clothing retailer in Canada. Because they’re still stuck in the dark ages and don’t yet have an online store, the company’s web marketing team consists of four people.
A week ago, my friend called me to ask, “What’s the industry average time spent on a site?” Her boss asked her to find out because she was doing a presentation to the marketing team and would be attempting to describe what was happening on their website.
My friend was looking at her analytics reports, assuming they should be reporting metrics like “time spent”, but she couldn’t give me any explanation as to why they were measuring certain things or how it all fit together. This marketing team had no idea what their analytics were trying to tell them.
Sound familiar? Whether or not we care to admit it, this problem is all too common. By themselves, the facts can be deceiving. If the facts don’t fit into a larger story line, they’re meaningless. Just because something happened, that doesn’t make it newsworthy. That’s why…
Marketers should think like news editors.
Your web analytics program works for you, not the other way around. It’s the news wire that serves your staff of reporters and, as editor-in-chief, it’s your job to decide which stories are most important.
There are two types of approaches to web analytics reporting:
• The beat reporter reliably follows the same story from day-to-day. If you tell the beat reporter to follow “time spent”, she will diligently explain where visitors spent the most time, how much time they spent overall, and how much time they spent today versus yesterday, last month, last year, and so on.
• The investigative reporter tries to find the meat of the story; to get the bottom of what truly matters. If you tell the investigative reporter to follow the “time spent” story, she’ll start to ask big picture questions. She’ll want to know why time spent matters, how it relates to your other metrics, whether “time spent” means one thing on one page and something very different on another, and whether it even matters if visitors are spending more — or less — time on your site verses the competition’s. She even wonders if this whole “time spent” thing is really a distraction. She doesn’t want to spend her time chasing false leads.
Like other default metrics, average time spent tells us nothing on its own. The company that my friend works for has over a thousand employees. Most of the staff in their home office and brick-and-mortar stores use computers every day, and many of them likely have their browser set up to go directly to the company’s homepage automatically. Each day, a large amount of their traffic probably comes from employees, not potential customers. If this is the case, the average time spent on their site tells them very little about the customer experience on their website, because employees’ time spent would skew this number. Likewise, the traffic sources would be skewed and the average page views and bounce rates from the landing page would also be skewed.
Don’t use your analytics tool just to report the facts. Become an investigative reporter. For each piece of information you find, ask yourself why it matters. Ask how the metrics tie together. Most importantly, ask yourself how the web metrics you report on tie into your overall business goals.
That’s how reporters break news.
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About the Author: Melissa Burdon is an investigative reporter (or Persuasion Analyst) at FutureNow. She’s also a recovering Canadian. Oh, and it’s her birthday.
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Written by:Melissa Burdon
Using Customer Review Keywords to Pick Up Women, Men
Have you ever noticed that if you really want good information about a product, you’re much more likely to find that information in a product review than in the product description itself?
Why aren’t product descriptions more helpful?
Here’s one thought: Men and women may care about different things. Product descriptions may not be speaking to both genders’ needs. In product reviews, men talk about what they care about, and women talk about what they care about. This may be one reason why reviews help increase conversion.
Here’s a real life example. I searched for reviews for gas grills. Although the reviewer’s gender isn’t always obvious, I picked two that had a good chance of being either male or female.
First, an excerpt from a gas grill review by “dickiedo” — I’m guessing that’s a man:
Pros: It is sturdy, attractive and cooks good.
Cons: I wish the control knobs were on the front of the grill.I bought this grill at Home Depot in the morning and that afternoon I grilled the best steaks I have ever cooked using the cooking instructions provided by Weber. The next day I grilled some great tasting hamburgers. Before cooking the burgers I heated the grill and easily brushed off the residue from the steaks leaving the cooking surface clean. I really liked cooking on my Weber charcoal grills, but I am now a firm Weber gas grill fan.
Now, an excerpt from a gas grill review by “juliet166″ — I’m guessing that’s a woman:
Pros: weber quality, even cooking, portability, easy cleanup
Cons: 14oz. propane canisters, lack of warming tray, no side traysI became a weber convert several years ago after purchasing a genesis silver c, and experiencing the exceptional cooking found in weber grills. Due to a divorce and move to a small apt without a deck, I was desperate for a grill that I could easily transport outdoors to use, but would not take up a lot of space inside my apt. Because of the dome shaped lid, it easily fits a small roast, or vertical rib stand. Clean up is easy just by letting the grill run a few minutes and then brushing with a wire brush.
I have not had any issues with the automatic ignition. I have been using my grill for 3 months now, and it always starts on the first or second push.
Here’s what’s interesting about these two reviews: They’re an example of the gender preferences Joseph Carrabis of NextStage Evolution talks about on the iMedia Connection blog, where he insists that women purchase strategically while men purchase immediately:
Men make purchasing decisions based strongly on immediate or present needs.
Women want to know that today’s purchase will meet their immediate needs, mid-term and even their needs long-term needs. Long-term and far-term usability can even be a stronger consideration for the female purchasing persona than immediate need
Notice that in Dickiedo’s testimonial, he’s talking about purchasing the grill that morning and grilling that afternoon — great job of speaking to a guy’s immediate and present need.
In Juliet’s review, she’s commenting that even after 3 months, the grill still starts on the first or second push, meeting a longer-term durability need.
Carrabis discusses another gender difference:
Men are willing to make a purchase once it has been demonstrated that someone else was successful with the same purchase; kind of a, “that worked for Joe, so it’ll probably work for me” mentality.
Women posit things differently. It’s good to know if something worked for Sally; it’s better to know what Sally’s motivations were for her purchase. Success in itself isn’t meaningful unless the conditions leading to success are the same. (So much for women not being cut out for the sciences!) This can be thought of as, “it may have worked for Sally, but Sally bought it for reason A and I’m interested in reason B, so the same purchase might not work for me.”
Juliet shares her background motivation for purchasing the grill. She’s recently divorced and moved to a small apartment without a deck. She wanted something she could transport outdoors but wouldn’t take up a lot of room. Now a woman can compare her motivation to Juliet’s to see if it’s a good match for her situation, for her motivation.
How can manufacturers and e-commerce sites use this information to create better product descriptions that sell more products?
- Talk about both immediate and long-term value. “Take it home this afternoon, grill steaks tonight”; “Our grills start at just the touch of a button now, and for months/years to come.”
- Talk about different motivations for buying the product and successful uses of it. “With our even heating system, grillers of all skills can cook the perfect steak every time”; “If you live in an apartment but still want the that backyard grill experience, this is the grill for you. It’s small and portable, but with a domed lid, so it’s big enough to cook family meals like a small roast or vertical rib stand.”
One more hint. While both Dickiedo and Juliet mentioned “easy cleaning”, Juliet got very specific with what that means (”Let the grill run for a few minutes and brush with a wire brush”). This may also tie-in with women’s need for longer-term value. I know a woman who’s sworn off a famous cookware brand because their products are very sensitive and hard to clean. Remember, she’s not just thinking about cooking dinner tonight, she’s picturing how she’ll use the product for months, even years to come. Make sure you’re talking about what it’s like to use and maintain the product in the future as well as the present.
By using keywords that address the underlying motivations of both men and women, your product descriptions are sure to pick them up before the competition.
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About the Author: Holly Buchanan is co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys. If you’d like to become a customer pickup artist like Holly, join her on June 2nd for FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in Manhattan.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
3 Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Convert to Leads
Want to ramp up the conversion rate on your lead generation site?
Lead generation sites fail to convert for three basic reasons:
1. Visitors don’t understand the value they get in exchange for giving their information.
2. They are informationally challenged and collect too little, too much, or incorrect information.
3. You haven’t established trust and set proper expectations of what to expect when doing business with you.
Obviously, each is interrelated and flow from one to the other. There might be a few more reasons, but for now, these three culprits are enough to start you identifying specific problems on your site and determining action items for optimization.
Keep in mind, more leads may not be what you need. You may need more qualified leads, and a properly planned Web site should help the visitor qualify herself.
We’ve worked with several companies that have seen a decrease in the number of leads, but increased sales and optimized the sales team time and closing ratios because the quality of their leads was improved.
Exchanging Value: My Name for Your Service
Many sites offering “free” whitepapers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information do a poor job of merchandising their downloads. Your downloads contain valuable information. Treat them as such.
Stop thinking of these downloads as free. You’re asking for something extremely valuable to both you and the visitor, their contact information. To get this valuable information “merchandise” your downloads better. Show the visitor the value of what they’re downloading. So when they fill out the lead form, they feel they’re making a good exchange, valuable information for valuable information.
- Include thumbnails of documents.
- Let them know what they’ll learn from the download.
- Let them know what they can do with the information.
- List everything what’s “in it for them” in the download.
- Let them know what will happen with their information. Will you be calling them? (More on this, below, under “Establishing Trust and Expectations”.)
If you offer a free trial or demo period, provide clear information about what they are getting. Is it a fully functional trial with a time limit? What happens when the demo runs out? Will you offer them support during the trial? (Sounds like a good way to win over a potential customer doesn’t it?) Disclose system requirements before they begin the sign up process.
Track the number of “bogus” e-mails you get, either bad e-mail addresses or e-mails from Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail. If you get too many emails from lucilleball@yahoo.com or elvisp@hotmail, rest assured that visitors don’t see value in the offer and the exchange.
Beware, sometimes these tactics will cause a drop in the number of leads, but rid you of junk leads. You have to determine if this is an acceptable trade off (it almost always is).
Help for the Informationally Challenged
Information, information, information is all around us. Some is useful, sometimes it’s hard to find what’s useful, and some information is just plain not helpful at all.
One approach to determine if you have info problems is to examine time spent on page. Often times I work with sites that have low time spent on main content pages but their FAQ page gets more visitor time. This may indicate that visitors aren’t finding information they need elsewhere. If a visitor relies on your FAQ to get information, it reduces trust. Why aren’t these frequent questions answered frequently (or linked to) on key pages like home and service/product pages?
Often sites put up so much information that visitors cannot find the piece of info they seek. This occasionally indicates an information architecture problem, but more often indicates that the visitors’ needs and motivations aren’t addressed in the content.
Another key issue often neglected is that often the person doing the research on the Web site isn’t the decision maker. She’s trying to gather, sort, and print (you do make it easy to do that, right?) information to give to the person making the decision. Are you making your site easy to understand for this person as well?
There really are no easy solutions to get your information in order. First begin to establish a persuasive framework, building personas then planning each persona’s interaction or persuasion scenarios with your site, and determining what information they need and when and where they need it on the site.
Establishing Trust and Expectations
Visitors must trust you. If they don’t, they don’t become leads or often they become bad leads. Visitors may even fill out a lead form if they mistrust you. Sometimes they are just going through the motion of getting proposals and pricing and are planning on buying from your competitor. You might have the better solution for them but the site or the lead process doesn’t instill enough confidence to take you seriously.
Most visitors who aren’t confident simply won’t contact you. They fear harassment from the sales team. Or sometimes your site is ineffective in communicating the values of the visitor and they bail. Again, this is a tragedy especially when you consider they could be in the market to buy what you sell.
Other times, visitors are in early stages of the buying process and an overly aggressive lead form will cause them to tighten up, assuming you’ll push them somewhere they don’t feel ready to go. Here are some things you can do to help instill trust.
- Include information about what it’s like to work with your company. Let them know when you will contact them. Assure them that you will only help them determine their needs and not pressure them.
- Ramp up your About Us page.
- Ask as few questions as possible in your lead form. Don’t force them to give you all types information or endure a stack of intimidating drop downs.
- Include short, friendly lead forms in several places on the site (not just your contact page). This will help you track where they filled out the form and better inform you what they might be interested in.
- Tell them exactly what will happen when they send their info, tell them how soon they will be hearing from you. If possible give them a choice of how and when they prefer to be contacted.
- Some visitors like to be prepared for the call. Provide a checklist of information they might need to have handy when they speak with you.
- Some visitors prefer to call. Provide the phone number near the lead form.
Now go get some leads.
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Originally seen on ClickZ.
Editor’s Note: Want more tips on lead-generation? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar.
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
How to Increase Shopping Cart Abandonment
So, it wasn’t exactly Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood (”I’ve abandoned my CAAARRRRRRT!!!”), but when Jeffrey told me today that he still hadn’t bought his nephew the Fisher Price Grow to Pro Basketball hoop after two weeks of putting it off, I assumed he was being dramatic.
Jeffrey claimed to be sticker shocked from shipping cost inflation, a common reaction while shopping online. One minute, you think you know the whole price. Then — bam — you proceed to checkout, only to find that the price has shot up as much as 25%.
Was Jeff being cheap? Probably. But it’s understandable.
The truth is that online shopping has spoiled us. When Amazon ships for free — at least it feels that way if you buy into Amazon Prime — and when Zappos wants you to return those shoes (yes, really), anything less feels like a cheap plastic substitute for the real thing.
ToysRUs.com does so many things right. The product image views are clear and show multiple angles. The customer reviews are helpful and thoroughly integrated. I could go on, but the important thing — the reason they still haven’t sold Jeffrey a Fisher Price Grow to Pro Basketball hoop — is that they set a poor expectation of total cost before checkout.
Here we see Toys ‘R’ Us insisting that their price is $39.99; a price even our CEO can afford. 
Sounds like a great deal!
And look at these reviews:
Wow, that’s a popular basketball hoop! You’d think he were buying an iPhone.
But when Jeffrey proceeds to checkout…
Fifteen dollars isn’t a big deal, but it’s something you’d never be asked to pay in a toy store. It’s not as though Jeff doesn’t have fifty-five dollars to spend on his nephew. [Author’s Note: Jeff has reminded me that he was shown a $22 shipping fee, making the $40 toy cost over $70 after tax. This begs the question as to why we were shown different shipping charges since neither of us was asked to enter a postal code and we visited the website from the same office.] It’s just that, like you, me, and the millions of people who shop online, we’re turned off by hidden fees.
Is it believable that it costs the company $15 to ship this product? Of course. It looks big and bulky, if not heavy. Is it reasonable to expect them to ship it for less than that? No! In fact, it’s very unreasonable. But logic has very little to do with it. This is about setting the right expectation.
People rationalize buying decisions with logic, but we make buying decisions based on feelings.
As Sitebrand’s Carolyn Gardener points out,
. . . when shipping becomes a pain point due to lousy check-out procedures, strict delivery options and exorbitant fees, the odds of cart abandonment increase.
When you consider the abandonment literally squashes someone’s intent to buy, not to mention the e-store’s ability to make money, it’s a very serious issue.
How to Avoid Shipping Shock
Jeffrey insists that he still plans on buying the basketball hoop from toysrus.com — and I’m pretty sure he will — but let’s brainstorm some ways for e-tailers to reduce the emotional impact of shipping cost shock.
- Offer multiple shipping options - Why should the retailer choose the shipping method? By giving the customer their choice of delivery options, the conversation becomes more about how soon they want it and how much the parcel service will charge them, not how much you’re going to charge them. Doing this also makes it easier to provide some level of free shipping. But good luck getting anyone who’s been spoiled by Zappos’ free overnight shipping policy to get excited because you offer complimentary snail mail. Still, as long as you show the costs for each shipping option right there in the shopping cart, you should be fine.
- Include shipping in price - Why not say “all prices include shipping” upfront on the product page? Some sites allow you to enter a postal code on the product page to estimate shipping rates. Others use new e-commerce technologies to show an estimated cost to ship to the visitor’s current location. If you don’t want to do either of those, at least tell the customer that shipping is not included in the price on the product page. This is especially true for larger items that are expensive to ship.
- Offer free shipping - A lot of established retailers may consider this to be a channel conflict. (”Why should we offer free shipping online? It would kill our profit margins.”) Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but if it’s at all a viable option, it will almost certainly lead to increased volume. Jeffrey would have gladly bought the same product on Amazon, but they told him it would take 1 - 3 months to ship. The irony, of course, is that without free shipping, it might take Jeffrey 1 - 3 months to actually buy it!
What other ways are smart e-tailers reducing shipping shock? If you have examples, please do share them in the comments.
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Want to reduce cart abandonment without sticker-shocking your CFO? We can help.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Using Flash
Adobe Flash has been habitually misused by design-centric website developers — so much so that a few of us at FutureNow tend to wince when it’s even mentioned in passing.
It’s not that we don’t like Flash. When used purposefully, Flash has the potential to dramatize a product or service’s benefits in ways that static pictures and text can’t quite match.
The micro-site for the Sigma DP-1 camera (choose language preference to start) is a good example of Flash done right.
Notice how the choreographed presentation of text and pictures dramatizes the benefit of having a DSLR image sensor in a compact camera body. And notice how the site’s designers capture your attention from the beginning of the presentation and lead you to a place where you can then interact with the camera’s features.
Sigma’s Flash presentation creates persuasive momentum, then leverages it by bringing viewers to an interactive website where they can drill down into specifics.
For an example of Flash used within a website — rather than as an introduction to a website — I recommend taking a look at this page from the Leo Diamond website. No, it’s not the prettiest site out there, but the Flash tools provide visitors with a better feel for diamond carrot size and color than either text or static pictures could. And it works.
Flash can be an effective tool when used intelligently and sparingly. But before you decide on using it, ask yourself the following questions:
1. What will this allow me to convey that text and static images wouldn’t?
2. Am I actually conveying benefits or just adding sparkle and glitz?
3. Is there a way to make this more interactive and not just a push-presentation?
4. If I can’t make it interactive, what can I do to hook the viewer right from the start, so they don’t skip the presentation? (You ARE going to provide a “skip” option, right?)
5. What pathways am I providing to the flash viewer when they are done with the interactive tool or presentation?
6. Are there clear links and pathways forward that will lead to conversion?
7. Will the static content allow visitors to drill down into the topics most important to them?
8. Does it address the visitor’s true concerns?
9. Will you capitalize on the persuasive momentum from the Flash presentation?
10. Do your calls to action continue to build on that momentum?
If you can answer those questions, it might be smart to use Flash sparingly.
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About the Author: Jeff Sexton is a Persuasion Architect, and on June 2nd, he’ll be taking the day off from helping clients fuse style and substance to teach FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in Manhattan.
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Written by:Jeff Sexton
Why Rivets, Not Icebergs, Sink Websites
Yesterday, exactly 96 years after she sank, it was revealed that the people who built the Titanic had used cheap iron rivets where — as fate would have it — the notorious iceberg hit.
The real tragedy is that all of this could have been avoided. (Imagine that, Kate and Leo fans! Your two love birds could have lived happily ever after.)
Harlan and Wolff, the shipbuilder that continues to deny that their choice of rivets was to blame for Titanic, must have known better — and, in fact, it seems they did. While their competitors relied exclusively on steel rivets for a ship’s bow, stern and hull, Harlan and Wolff used low-grade iron rivets for the bow and stern of their ships.
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. After all, they were building the three largest ships in the world — Britannic, Olympic, and Titanic — at the same time! But when a relatively common iceberg gouged Titanic’s bow, Harlan and Wolff’s riveting scheme proved disastrous.
Jennifer Hooper McCarthy, co-author of a new book on Titanic, exposes the pre-launch jitters:
“The board was in crisis mode … It was constant stress. Every meeting it was, ‘There’s problems with the rivets and we need to hire more people.’ ”
But before we judge Harlan and Wolff for cutting costs, or The White Star Line for apparently financing Titanic on the cheap, we should ask ourselves: Has the conventional wisdom really changed in the past 96 years?
Each day, CMO’s and small business owners are forced to make decisions that cause dangerous leaks in the websites they manage. Maybe they didn’t have enough time or budget to make sure it was built right. Maybe they compromised. Maybe they decided not to hire a good copywriter. Maybe they paid an agency to plan, build and write the entire website for them, just because a one-stop-shop scenario seemed easier to explain to the board. And when the site launched without sinking, it was considered a success because it was built with cafes, squash courts, a swimming pool, Turkish baths, a barbershop, three libraries and cheap iron rivets.
With that mentality, is it any wonder why — year after year — the average conversion rate is between 2-3%?
It doesn’t have to be this way.
If your web strategy is more focused on bells and whistles than nuts and bolts (or rivets), maybe it’s time to stop shuffling the deck chairs.
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Already launched? FutureNow can help you test the rivets on your site.
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Written by:Robert Gorell
Using Video to Build Better Customer Relationships
Advertising Age recently did a CMO roundtable video. It’s a great idea: Get a bunch of top Chief Marketing Officers with a moderator and ask them to discuss their biggest challenges.
I guarantee you a lot of CMO’s (and a whole lot of other people) tuned in to watch this frank round table discussion.
What industry is your website targeting? Are you a sales training company targeting sales managers? Why not get together a group of 3-4 sales managers and ask them to talk about their biggest challenges with employee training?
Are you a website development company targeting small business owners? Why not gather a group of small business owners and record a session where they talk about their experiences — good and bad — with trying to put up a website that increases business?
These would have to be candid, honest discussions about real issues people are facing. There’s no sales pitch for your company allowed in these videos. It’s simply your way to facilitate an honest discussion about the issues and challenges within your industry.
Consider of the power video. When a prospective customers comes to your site to watch this video, they gain knowledge and insight from watching peers discuss issues that are important to them.
THEN you can create copy and links, so that after they watch the video, you can show how your service addresses their issues, solves their problems, and overcomes their challenges.
It’s called building rapport. You’re letting your prospective customers know: “We understand you. We care about the same issues you do. We’re in touch with people like you, and if we’re listening to their concerns, needs, and desires, we’ll listen to yours, too.”
It’s about showing, not telling. Instead of saying, “We’re an industry leader, well versed in the problems that sales managers face every day,” SHOW them. It will be way more effective.
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About the Author: Holly Buchanan is co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys; and co-instructor of FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar, June 2nd in Manhattan.
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Written by:Holly Buchanan
