Sorry about the headline – the 80s flashbacks are getting to me.  Still, I really do “play stupid” as a Website optimizer and online copywriter.  Or at least I play ignorant.

Why?  Because all those terms and concepts you think everyone understands about your business and what you’re selling – well, you’re wrong about them!  Wrong about both the terms themselves and your potential audience.  If you think I’m mistaken, go back and watch the video again.

Or keep reading to see some real website examples. Either way, let me reassure you that way more of your website visitors just fundamentally don’t “get it” than you’d ever suspect.  Either those visitors:

1. have no idea what the industry standard terms you are using mean,
2. don’t really understand the finer distinctions the terms are supposed to represent, or
3. fail to draw the all-important conclusions and emotional implications that you may be basing your persuasive messaging upon.

Any one of those might be enough to kill your chances for a conversion.

And while there are some good reasons to only mention or allude to the “features” in order to hone in on the benefits, there’s also very few excuses* not to provide links, mouse-overs, and early stage content that can guide the perplexed to a better understanding of your industry and your messaging.

How an “idiot” could improve the Black Diamond Home Page

For those of you who haven’t heard of this company before, Black Diamond Equipment makes cutting edge climbing and skiing equipment.  And before we even look at one of their product pages, I suggest you just go to their website and get a feel for how user-friendly (or not) the overall design seems.  Seriously, go there right now.  I’ll wait.

Ok, now ask yourself this:

• Doesn’t it feel as if the company ONLY produces carabiners?  If you didn’t know the company produced headlamps, skis, tents, etc, would you ever think to look for those?
• Did it take you a while to figure out that the pictured carabiners could be clicked on and rotated towards you?  Or was that just intuitively obvious?  What do you think the designers felt about the “obviousness” of this design.
• If you weren’t interested in carabiners and never clicked on the “see all carabiners” link, would you ever have gotten to the pages dealing with other equipment?
• What do you think is keeping them from simply using a persistent top navigation scheme?
• Do you think “playing an idiot” for a day would help these guys out?

Idiot-Proofing Product Pages 101

Now let’s compare a product page on the Black Diamond site with one for the same product taken from backcountry.com.  We’ll start with a product page for a LED headlamp taken from the Black Diamond site:

What the heck is a “TriplePower LED”?

• Is it 3-times more powerful than a 5mm Nichia LED?
• Is it a 3-watt LED?
• Is it an LED with 3 power settings?

By using this terminology, Black Diamond has achieved the worst of both worlds, not only is the description not enough for a non-light geek to really understand, but neither is it technical enough for a light geek to feel confident in what he is buying.

How about underlining these terms and providing a mouse-over that would show comparisons of the LEDS, their real technical specs, and usage shots, so that an average user could get a sense of the light output and a techie could see the real specs?

And what about the “NRG Rechargable battery”?

• Is it a Lithium-Ion battery?
• Is it Metal Hydride?
• How much does it cost?
• Does it improve or hurt the battery life of the light?
• Can I buy the light already bundled with the battery and it’s charger, etc?

Finally, there’s the “single position switch.”  I’m guessing it’s some sort of rubberized button-looking thing and that you just have to keep clicking it to rotate through all 7 of the modes until you get the one you want.  But wouldn’t it be nice to know for sure:

• That a single position switch = clicky switch, like on a Mag-Light
• What exactly those 7 lighting modes are, and why I’d need that many modes
• Where the button is located?

From the pictures it looks like the “single position switch” might be on the bottom of the light, but assuming that’s the case, wouldn’t it be better to link the term “single position switch” to a mousover of that picture along with an explanation of how the switch functions and what the 7 modes are?

As for backcountry.com’s product page for this same headlamp, the page is too long for me to snap an encompasing screenshot and place it here, but I suggest you go to that page and take a look at all of the content rich resources that are provided, including:

• customer photos of the product in-use,
• user reviews, Q&A’s, and
• some actual, non-bullet-pointed, real copy.

But since we’re focusing on the copy, I’ve cut and pasted it below.  Read it and see how many questions this copy answers that Black Diamond’s bullet points leave unclear:

“The Black Diamond Icon Headlamp uses two different types of LED bulbs to give you ultra-bright lighting when you need it and to save battery power when you don’t. The 3-watt center bulb has three settings for light up to 80 meters. Switch to the four SuperBright LED bulbs to get a 200-hour burn time when a lot of light isn’t necessary. This combination of long-distance lighting and long burn time makes the Black Diamond Icon Headlamp a stand-out choice for everything from backpacking to climbing to night skiing. In fact, it impressed Rock and Ice so much that they gave it their Best In Gear Award.

Bottom Line: The Black Diamond Icon Headlamp provides both bright lighting and long-lasting battery life for days on the trail, the rock, and the snow.”

Even if it’s not perfect, that copy is still much clearer, isn’t it?  And understand this: the majority of what isn’t covered in this copy is covered in the user reviews, Q&A’s, etc.  In fact, I’m convinced that the persuasive power of user reviews has as much to do with previous buyers unintentionally answering other customers’ questions within the reviews as it has to do with the increased credibility of user reviews.

Also, understand that this unexplained-term phenomenon isn’t exclusive to technical products, either; it happens in product descriptions for almost everything.  I could have just as easily used tents and asked what the hell a double-wall tent is and why it should matter to me, and so on.

Reverse “The Curse” with Idiot Exercises

While “The Curse of Knowledge” can be hard to overcome, here are a few** sure-fire techniques to get you started on your journey to idiot-optimized copy:

• Do usability testing.  Get someone outside your industry (go ahead and specify minimum industry knowledge in your user request) and watch them move through your site while recording their questions, thoughts, etc.
• Highlight every industry term, phrase, or concept on your site, write them down on a piece of paper, and start interviewing random people on the street about them, just like the guy did in the video.
• Willfully play the part of a 5 year old and ask repeated why questions regarding your industry terms and concepts.  It’s best to team up with a partner/colleague on this one.  Force each other to come up with answers a 10-year old would understand.

After having done any one, or all, of the 3 strategies, go back and re-evaluate your copy.

P.S.  Hat tip to Seth Godin for finding the video and creating a great blog post around it

* Actually, there’s only one excuse: you’re purposely excluding a general audience in order to tightly focus on a hard-core group.  In that case, go ahead amd talk the lingo without apologies, letting anyone and everyone else catch up if they can.  Just realize that you WILL be alienating visitors and potential customers in order to appeal to that smaller, hard-core group.

** Of course, the best sure-fire method of escaping the curse of knowledge is simply to hire an outside copywriter/consultant/optimization specialist

[Editor’s note: the author of this blog is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com

All copywriting stories are “nested.”

In writing copy you inevitably create – at a minimum – one frame of reference: the one between your authorial voice and the reader.

In fact, copywriting teachers often advise aspiring writers to “talk” onto the page as if they’re talking to a best friend, simply because that mental exercise animates that almost invisible frame of reference in the mind of the writer.* Writers who forget that frame of reference tend to produce artificial, corporate-speak copy.

So introducing a story into your conversation with the audience instantly “nests” that story within the larger “narrative” of your copy, one frame of reference within the larger frame in which you’re “speaking” to the prospect.

But most readers are consciously oblivious to this frame-shifting because the nesting often takes place rather quickly.  And also because great copywriters smooth-over or hide the frame switching in much the same way that a film editor cuts between camera angles without drawing attention to the cut.  You don’t consciously realize that your TV show changes camera shots an average of every 4 seconds do you?  Don’t believe it?  Count it out for yourself:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And just as with the TV film cuts so it is with frame switching in copy: once you know what to look for, this technique will start to jump out at you.  Let’s take a look at one of the more famous examples of this written by Martin Conroy:

“On a beautiful late spring afternoon, twenty-five years ago, two young men graduated from the same college. They were very much alike, these two young men. Both had been better than average students, both were personable and both – as young college graduates are – were filled with ambitious dreams for the future.

Recently, these men returned to their college for their 25th reunion.
They were very much alike. Both were happily married. Both had three children. And both, it turned out, had gone to work for the same Midwestern manufacturing company, and were still there.

But there was a difference. One of the men was manager of a small department of that company. The other was its president.

What Made The Difference

Have you ever wondered, as I have, what makes this kind of difference in people’s lives? It isn’t always a native intelligence or talent or dedication. It isn’t that one person wants success and the other doesn’t.

The difference lies in what each person knows and how he or she makes use of that knowledge.

And that is why I am writing to you and to people like you about The Wall Street Journal. For that is the whole purpose of the Journal: To give its readers knowledge – knowledge that they can use in business…”

Did you notice how quickly the nesting took place?

If not, the beginning of this, perhaps the most famous direct mail piece of all time, initiates the story telling frame by starting in storybook fashion, except that instead of “once upon a time,” Martin Conroy starts telling his story with “on a beautiful late spring afternoon.” And with that one phrase Conroy establishes both his authorial voice, speaking to you, and establishes the inner frame of reference – that of the business parable.  Pretty cool huh?

Now recall the important lesson from my previous post on frame-switching:

Emotions created in one frame echo across to the other

So if a story told within your copy is necessarily a nested story, then the emotions created within that inner story will echo across to the sales conversation of the “frame” story, i.e. the rest of the copywriting.

Do you see where this is going?

If not, what’s important to realize here is that a copywriter can say things in story format that he cannot credibly state within regular copy.  Conroy can’t really start his ad with “Hey, if you don’t buy The Wall Street Journal, you’ll never rise above middle management.”  Undoubtedly, that line of copy would have created a firestorm of complaints.

And yet the emotions behind that statement – nay, even more powerful emotions, since they’ve now been given life within the mental image of facing either success or frustration at a college reunion – slide under the radar screen and into the minds of Conroy’s readers under cover of this story.  The nested story emotionally primes the reader within the safe confines of “just a story”, while simultaneously positioning that emotional charge t0 jump across to the rest of the copy.

So when Conroy changes frames by slipping in a direct address to the reader with his first subheading of “What made the difference?” his readers are already emotionally primed to eagerly anticipate and take advantage of this all-important “difference” between the two young men.

This causes many readers to interpret Conroy’s offer that The Wall Street Journal will provide  “knowledge that they can use in business” as ‘the WSJ will help me get the promotions I deserve’  – a conclusion made more powerful because it comes from within the reader and not explicitly from the copy itself.

Yet while just thinking about this technique as presented, in terms of explicit story telling, will cause you to spot scads of examples from famous copywriting ads, you won’t really see how widely the technique is used until you realize that:

Referring to the past = Story Telling

For instance, does anyone really think that John Caples’ brilliant headline, “They laughed when I sat down at the piano,” is any less of an introduction to a nested story than Conroy’s “One fine spring day”?

Or how about this one from Sean D’souza’s Psychotactics Newsletter:

When I first started in business, I’d spend hours in meetings.
 I’d be driving to meetings. I’d be sitting in meetings. And
 then I’d get back to my home-office (I no longer work from
 home). And then have to do the job that the client and I agreed
 upon. And I’d do this six-sometimes seven days a week.
Fifty-two weeks a year.
=====================================
I was too afraid to go on vacation
=====================================
I was afraid that a really big job would come along, just as I was getting on the plane. I’d have nightmares about how the client would call; find me away; give the job to my competition, and then continue to work with the competition.
=====================================
I was living in a bit of a trap
=====================================
And I couldn’t get out. And then I discovered the power of copywriting. That copywriting was more than just copy.  It was control…

Sean establishes his nested story with the simple phrase “When I first started in business” and then goes on to shine a bright light on the sensitive emotionally needs of his audience – without offending them!

Nested storytelling and frame switching are everywhere

• Joe Karbo Frank Schultz used a nested story in his famous “Fluke of Nature” grapefruit ad, which starts with, “I’m a farmer, and the story I tell you is the absolute truth, as incredible as it may seem”

• Joseph Sugarman used it for his first BluBlockers ad, wherein the first subhead reads, “When I put on the pair of glasses what I saw I could not believe.  Nor will you.”  And his first line of copy?  “I am about to tell you a true story.”

• Ogilvy frequently made use of stories within his Schwepes and Hathaway campaigns.

• The old Charles Atlas ads certainly used storytelling, as the ad writer, Charles P. Roman, headlined them with the immortal, “The insult that made a man out of Mac”

• Frank Irving Fletcher created his famous “A $10,000 Mistake” ad as a short form story.  Here’s the entire ad: “A $10,000 Mistake: A client for whom we had copied a necklace of Oriental Pearls, seeing both necklaces before her, said: Well, the resemblance is remarkable, but this is mine! Then she picked ours! Tecla; 398 Fifth Avenue, New York”

• And if you really want to see short form story taken to the realm of art, wherein the whole of Conroy’s WSJ opening is recast in 9 short words, then take a look at this:

Finally, for those of you who stuck with me on this, I offer you a dessert ; )

If you really want to see a master of nested storytelling, just watch any of the Bill Cosby videos available on YouTube and pay attention to how Cosby effortlessly switches from being within the story to talking to the audience directly.  I think this one on “Jeffery” is a great one to start with:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So the natural thing to do is trim non-performing words and phrases in order to increase the efficiency of your PPC spend.  And that’s exactly what one client did, except rather than increasing his efficiency, he dropped his sales by 30%.

Why?

Because, depending on what you sell, lots of people buy on their second, third, or umpteenth visit to your site, rather than the first visit.  Those visitors are building confidence in you as they move through their buying process.  But most systems don’t (or can’t) track user behavior over multiple visits.   So when those early and middle buying-stage keywords shown up as non-converters, they get cut.

The shame is that not everyone is able to track the following sales drop off, which may not occur for days, weeks, or months, back to the act of cutting those keywords.

Trading away Dennis Rodman as a Non-performing Player?

Would you trade Dennis Rodman for non-performance?  Of course not, right?  Rodman’s defensive stats alone tell the tale.  At his prime, Dennis was pulling down a truly astonishing 18.7 rebounds per game.  For reference, the previous year’s league leader in rebounds (David Robinson) averaged 13 per game.

But if the only stats you looked at involved scoring, you’d get a different picture. Comparing Rodman’s 8-9 points per game against other star players’ 20 or more points per game, you’d likely have been misled into trading Rodman, only to find yourself wondering why you started losing games and everyone else’s scoring stats went up against your team.

Think of your assisting keywords terms as the Dennis Rodman’s of your PPC campaign, except you’ll get all the assists and none of the off-court shenanigan’s.

There’s plenty of other ways myopic analysis can leading you astray

A recent eConsultancy post discusses how Google’s default window for tracking cookies can distort traffic data.  Left in its default cookie window setting, Google Analytics (GA) will classify visitors as “search”-driven traffic for six months following a single search based click through to your site – regardless of how they got to your site previous to that search or how they might arrive at your site following that search. Here’s an example of how this might skew your results:

Let’s say you’re driving traffic to your site via radio ads and that a listener, after hearing your ad, types your url directly into his browser.  Later, he comes back but this time, he types your business name into Google and clicks through on a displayed search result.  Following that, he visits your site three more times via bookmark or directly typing your URL into his site. That’s a total of 5 visits.

Question: How many of those visits would GA classify as search-driven?

Answer: 4 out of 5.

GA would count the first search-based visit and then all of the remaining 3 visits, despite the fact that the following three visits didn’t use search and may have taken place several months after the initial search.  Multiply that by all your visitors/visits, and you can see how your understanding of what drives traffic to your website might be distorted in favor of search. And under the impression that your traffic was mostly generated by search and not, say, your radio ads, you might be tempted to cut them from your ad spend.   Obviously, the same thing could apply with e-mail campaigns, magazine ads, etc.

Bringing Clarity and Orientation to Web Improvement Efforts

Any experienced Web Analyst or Website Optimizer could extend this list of “gotchas” and “classic mistakes” almost indefinitely.  It’s just not that uncommon for an uncareful analysis of data to lead online marketers either to analysis paralysis or sub-optimal optimization strategies.  Is it any wonder that 70% of businesses collecting wed data fail to act on their analytics data?

Obviously this issue has been central to Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Web careers since the beginning.  It’s why they helped found the Web Analytics Association; why they published The Marketer’s Common Sense Guide to eMetrics, Call to Action and Always Be Testing; why they created Persuasion Architecture; and ultimately why they’ve built the OnTarget program.

The central theme amongst all of these issues is bringing clarity and actionable insight to Web improvement and online marketing efforts.  They are all answers to the business owner who feels confused or disoriented by the data he’s given and want’s a clear direction toward more sales/conversions and improved website performance.

So, if you find yourself struggling to make sense of your online marketing data, or frustrated by non- or counter-productive optimization efforts, ask yourself: are you giving credit where it’s deserved?  Or do you need help achieving greater clarity and actionable insight from your optimization efforts?

In fact, whenever I work with B2B and complex sales clients it’s a sure bet their website won’t:

1) Adequately address the multiple decision-makers and influencers involved in securing the lead

If a sales manager needs to justify a training expense to his CEO and CFO, wouldn’t it help to provide your inside champion with messaging and tools to help him make his (read “your”) case?

It’s usually good to have sections of your website and messaging designed specifically for those secondary decision-makers and influencers that need to sign-off on the decision of your inside champion.  As an analogy to the consumer world, would you really want to construct a website that sells engagement rings without providing content and messaging for the prospective fiancee?

2) Have planned (and tracked) conversion points for visitors who are early in the buying process

To keep with the consumer analogy, let’s say you’re considering having a pool put into your back yard.  Assuming that one of your local pool suppliers/installers had a website with valuable early and middle stage content, how many times might you visit their website before actually contacting them and becoming a lead?

• You might come to them early on when doing preliminary research regarding what type of pool you wanted, what size, shape, depth, etc you should look at, what kind of associated expenses and purchases are involved, etc.  Reading this stuff might take 3-5 or even 15 different visits.  How would you know if any of these visits are successful?  How could you measure or get a handle on your Website’s influence on such a buyer?I’d normally suggest having a goal for these types of visitors.  Maybe it’s downloading a pool planning or pools for dummies report/PDF.  Maybe it’s playing with an interactive pool builder or pool cost calculator.  Whatever it is, having a trackable (and helpful) event for these early stage buyers helps to track your Website’s success in attracting and engaging

• Moving to the middle stage of the buying process, you might touch the site again when you are closer to buying and constructing a short list of potential contractors/installers.  This time you might drill down into why you should do business with them and not someone else, reading up on their installation timelines, the skill of their install crew, etc.You may or may not feel like filling out a lead form at this point.  But a valuable and well-merchandised free download titled something like, “10 Questions to Ask Any Pool Contractor,” might look far more attractive to you – especially if you only had to provide a name and e-mail (rather than the lead forms more detailed info requests) to get it.

• And then at the late stage of your buying process you might look at the site a third time to fill out the form or get the phone number to actually buy the pool. What a waste if the pool website only had the lead form as a conversion point, without ever providing (let alone tracking) any of the early and middle stage downloads and conversion events.  Questions would go unanswered, and prospective buyers would go unengaged / go somewhere else.

Needless to say, the exact same patterns of behavior occur for B2B sites as well.  And yet most B2B sites don’t have defined content and conversion points for their early and middle stage visitors.  Your prospective leads are going to go somewhere to get their questions answered, shouldn’t it be on your website not your competitors?

3)  Have metrics/analytics capable of tracking visitor behavior over multiple visits.

While early and middle stage conversion points help a Web analyst/website optimizer get a better handle on a sites overall success in engaging early and middle stage buyers, it still leaves them guessing at the big picture, simply because they can’t track a lead generation or sale all the way back to that prospect’s first visit to the Website.  This can be crucial for gauging the real success of a PPC campaign.  Key words that might look unprofitable (because they target earlier stage buyers) might be spectacularly profitable – but only after the 8th (or 20th) visit to the site.  Unfortunately, if you can’t track visitor behavior over multiple visits, it’s difficult to get a handle on real – vs. false- measures of keyword performance.

While I love, love, love Google Analytics / Google Ad Words, this is exactly one of these tools shortcomings.  And it’s one reason that we insist that our OnTarget clients install our software in addition to GA/GWO: OnTarget can bracket visitor behavior through keyword entry and track individual visit behavior over multiple visits.  It’s a wish-list come true for us Future Now Persuasion Architects and can be a positive boon for our On Target clients.

So there you have it: start matching your B2B and complex sale website to the real complexity of your sale.  I’ll be writing follow-up posts with exercises and steps on how to do this, but in the meantime, would it be too forward of me to suggest you sign up for On Target?

But (most) websites aren’t linear because hyperlinks break linearity (aka subvert hierarchy).

People don’t read (most) Websites one full page at a time in a numbered order; they read/scan/move from one link that interests them to the next link that interests them, often entering or starting on something other than page #1 (what bad web designers notionally understand as the home page).

This means “Long copy” and “short copy” only apply to Websites metaphorically at best, roughly translating to “content rich & substantiated” and “minimalist / pared down,” respectively.

The upside is that hyperlinks make it possible to get the best of both (offline) worlds. Visitors who want more substantiation and richer content can drill down on the links that interest them, and visitors who only want a quick, bottom-line summary and an express path to converting can get that too – all on the same site.

That said, long copy equivalents still tend to out-convert “short copy” alternatives.  Here’s why.

The crucial element: Are you answering their questions & concerns?

Two recent studies, one involving complex B2B sales/Websites and one on e-commerce sites, show that well over 50% of potential leads/customers fail to convert because the Websites studied failed to answer prospects’ questions and provide needed information.

I’ve experienced it myself: if I need to know a wireless card or piece of software will work on my Mac, I’m simply not buying until I get that answered. Similar dynamics exists with concerns rather than absolute requirements, and, yes, this is especially critical for services, complex sales, and lead generation.

Content rich sites typically out-convert minimalist designs because they more completely answer the prospects’ questions.

And as I’ve previously written, question-answering content isn’t just copy. High quality pictures answer questions and concerns. User reviews answer questions and concerns. So do videos, blogs, forums, etc. And, of course, there’s persuasive copy.

Modeling Customer Psychology and Persuasive Online Copywriting

Suppose you’re genuinely interested in buying something, talking to a salesman about it, and in the process of asking how much it costs. How many times can that sales guy dodge or ignore your question before he destroys your trust?

Once? Twice, maybe.

With online copy, visitors ask questions by scanning the page and clicking on links. If your web copy doesn’t facilitate scanning and skimming, and if you don’t provide hyperlinks and content to answer visitors’ questions, your Website will become that used car salesman who won’t give a straight answer to a direct question.

At Future Now, we’re big on Personas simply because we’re big on making sure Websites answer the questions and concerns of their visitors.  We find it essential to model and facilitate the flow of visitor-website sales conversations in order to avoid the “used car salesman” syndrome.

So rather than having any old interaction or conversation with visitors, personas allow one to reverse engineer conversations that lead to conversions. To do this, simply:

• Take a persona’s emotional state, concerns, and informational needs upon entering a Website
• Compare that starting point with what the visitor will have to feel, know, and believe in order to confidently take the action you want them to convert
• And then plan out the conversation your site will need to have with that persona in order to make that persuasive journey from starting point to sale.

Going through this process allows Website designers and copywriters to persona-lize the Website. They can plan messaging and links custom tailored for each buying behavior/motivation.  The visitor can then self-determine just how many rabbit-holes of information/assurance/question-answering she needs to in order to feel comfortable buying, thereby getting the exact “length” of copy that’s right for her.

Fast decision makers and late stage buyers that just need a quick and easy way to buy, get it. And those visitors needing a lot of information, insight, and assurance can get that too.

Think of it as an adult and sales-oriented choose-your-own-adventure novel. Or just think of it as a really sincere sales conversation performed by your best salesman who just happens to be available to talk to (and convert) customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

What more could you ask from either long or short copy?

P.S. For a different (but congruent) take on the advantages of Long Copy (and it’s online equivalents), check out Sonia Simone’s excellent article over at CopyBlogger.

Absolutely not, right?  Or at least not yet.

You came to buy a specific book.  You’ve already got a task in mind and browsing random books aint it.  You’ll likely blow past any and all call-outs, recommendations, and other assorted distractions until you’ve found the book you came to buy.

And if Amazon ends up not having the book in stock, you’ll go elsewhere.

But AFTER you’ve found the book you wanted, recommendations are welcomed. At that point you’ll actually pay attention to other books Amazon recommends and bundles with your searched-for book.   You’ll even look at what other Amazon shoppers eventually bought after viewing your friend’s book.

Task Orientation Defines Scent

This Amazon thought experiment exemplifies the task-orientation common to most online visitors.

Visitors arrive at your site with a goal in mind.  They already have a task, and your website either helps them accomplish that task or it gets dumped.  And that goes for every page on your site – either it contains the content the visitor wants, or it provides a link to it, or the visitor leaves.

But what about people just wanting to browse?

This is a question posed to me in a recent comment.  As the commenter put it:

“… when I’m browsing through Amazon – with no other goal than to pass the time – I get converted to buy stuff all the time.

‘People who bought x also bought Y’ And if the book or cd Y is something I’ve been interested in – it triggers a purchase.”

His point was that browsing is a task-less online activity that eliminates the importance of scent.

And it’s an interesting question/thought.  To answer it, I’ll first have to distinguish between early stage shopping and true browsing.

Early Stage Buying vs. True Browsing

In the early stage of the buying process, the visitor is aware of an itch he’d like to scratch, but isn’t quite sure exactly what purchase will best scratch that itch.  Let’s say our shopper is vaguely aware of wanting to get in shape, and is kind of wanting to do Yoga.  But he’s not sure if he wants to do Yoga in a dedicated studio, or take classes in a more general, multi-purpose gym, or just buy some tapes for home workouts.

This Yoga shopper is still task oriented – it’s just that the task is researching rather than buying.  And a home-workout themed website or Yoga Studio website that helped her do the research stands a far better chance of getting her business than a Website exclusively focused on late stage buyers.

This is one reason we highly recommend catering to early stage buyers and developing a content strategy for them.  And for more info on how to do that effectively, check out David Young’s excellent video series: Hunting for Early Bird Persuasion

Browsing is different.  Browsing means the shopper isn’t even clearly aware of a product desire yet. They’re not even focused on research.  If asked, the shopper couldn’t even describe the itch they’re looking to scratch.   And yet, they could buy if presented with the right product.

Browsers are still task-oriented

Despite appearances, browsing isn’t task-free.  Even though a specific object hasn’t (yet) catalyzed their free-floating desire, browsing visitors are still driven by desire.

Browsers are seeking novelty and possibility: the possibility of finding something different and better than they’d have imagined.   Browsers are as goal-oriented as any other shopper – just with different goals.

And as is true with every goal-oriented shopper, any website that fails to deliver on those goals gets dumped.  In fact, most shoppers only browse on sites that have already proved themselves capable of delivering novel products.

People browse Amazon.com not because it presents them with recommendations on the home page, but because Amazon masterfully presents them with interesting possibilities of new books that are similar to and possibly even remarkably better than books we’re already impressed with.  This is why the commenter I quoted from recalled the ‘People who bought x also bought Y’ quote rather than a “view Amazon recommendations” quote.

So how does a site plan to deliver on this search for novelty and cooler-than-expected items?

What it takes to be a browsing-friendly Website

Apart from bargain-priced rotating-inventory sites like bluefly, overstock.com or woot.com, the top three e-tailers most noted for browsing-friendly design are:

• Amazon
• Zappos
• iTunes

Here’s what they have in common:

They sell “impulse-buy-friendly” and “most-people-own-a-bunch” items.  Think about it: books, music, and shoes are all things we buy a lot of AND things we buy on impulse.  So each of these sites have a lot of repeat visits/visitors AND a fair chance at luring visitors into impulse buys.

They make it easy to sample the items in stock. iTunes lets you actually listen to the song.  Amazon lets you read the dust cover, table of contents, and a few passages from the book.  Most reviews also give you a flavor of the book.  Zappos gives you the best product photography to be found and provides expedited shipping both ways, which is a way to eliminate the pain and friction of customers trying on and “sampling” the shoes.

They routinely get new items in stock and make it a point to stock huge inventories. If browsers want novelty, it helps to be able to provide it, both with new stuff and with stuff I’ve never heard of before.  Amazon.com has all sorts of weird titles I’d never find at my local Barnes & Noble or even imagine existed.  Same thing with iTunes and Zappos.  Browsing shoppers know that novelty is only a click away.

They have solid user reviews set-up. Amazon and Zappos make up for limited sampling through user reviews, making it no coincidence that they have the best and most solidly established review communities on the Web. iTunes lags behind the others when it comes to reviews, but makes up for by better sampling, lower average price point, and better than average recommendations.

They make it easy to sort by regular categories AND by loose associations. Amazon let’s me see cool webs of connections between books, and look at user generated lists.  Zappos provides great filtered navigation options, so that I can not only sort by black men’s dress shoes, but also by black cap-toe lace up oxfords that cost between $100 and $150.  And many of the revues compare shoes, even to the point of recommending alternatives.  iTunes allows users to sort music by genre, decade, and browse with the aid of since-you-bought-that-you’ll-like-this recommendations.  For even better filtered, or faceted, sorting, check out this Get Elastic article as well as their thoughts on using user filtering and sorting preferences to personalize visitors shopping experience.

They’ve eliminated or greatly reduced buying friction. I can buy shoes on Zappos and get them next day or by 2nd day for free shipping.  With Amazon prime, I get 1-Click buying, and free 2nd-day shipping.  iTunes allows me to enjoy my music within seconds of buying.  And I know I’ll never have a problem with billing or customer service with these e-tailers.  There’s simply no friction to buying and a good bit of near-instant gratification – important factors for inspiring impulse buys.

Saying content is king is the equivalent of saying money is valuable; it’s true but obvious. Tell that to the even the most mentally challenged Web marketer today, and you’ll likely get a, “Duh, where have you been?” in return.

Nobody needs to be told content is of value. But how valuable is it?

Because there isn’t a $1, $5, or $10 denomination stamped on the front of Web content, it’s often difficult to know exactly how valuable content is to your company. Also, knowing content’s value isn’t the same as knowing how to create it, or even how to use it.

What Is Content?

This is a critical question that often goes underexplored. If you ask most marketers, they’ll answer that it’s the copy on a Web site. While this answer is certainly true, it’s inadequate. Content is more than copy.

We can debate the nuance of the possible answers to this question. But a good starting place is to think of Web content as the public conversation that happens between you and the visitor, whether the conversation is one-way (from you to the visitor), two-way (between the visitor and you), or conversation among visitors.

Content includes but is not limited to:

• The copy on your Web site
• Blogs and reader comments
• Content widgets (check out recently released ContentWidgets.com
• Product/service reviews
• Forums
• Videos, demos, and animations
• Tweets
• Facebook/MySpace fan pages and groups
• E-mail newsletters
• Articles and other intellectual property or knowledge sharing
• Whitepapers, case studies, Webinars

The more this content causes, persuades, or woos visitors to take a profitable action on our behalf, the more valuable it is. If it doesn’t do this, it’s more like bad entertainment.

Content Now Worth More Than Ever

The economic forecast remains rough for at least the near future. It’s easy to make a case for leveraging existing content for all it’s worth. I would also encourage you to determine the costs of content creation strategies (if you have in the past, revisit them now). You’ll likely find that content creation is becoming more affordable. Many of our clients are easily making room in their budgets to try at least a few content-centered marketing tactics.

Using content as a marketing tool is obvious for those with compelling intellectual property, but it isn’t just for those types any more. Almost any company or service can find a content-marketing strategy that will work for it.

An employee of mine has been looking for a home in a new area, and was impressed to find a few Realtors tweeting. He followed them. He was able to meet with one, walk through a property, and find he was from the same area as the real estate agent. Since he didn’t yet have a Realtor, whom do you think he is going to choose?

Getting Started With Content Marketing

• You don’t have to start from scratch. If you have content already, look to your analytics to identify popular content and find other uses for it. Rewrite it, update it, and send it as a newsletter. Even tweet it as an oldie but a goodie. Or have it formatted for mobile browsers.
• Crowdsource. Sometimes your customers will create better content than you can buy from a content creation firm. Why not use specific reviews or forum posts as landing places for campaigns or even as ads?
• Find the passion. Somebody in the company interested or fluent in a particular social media, or has been itching to write a company blog? Now is the time to let him loose. Let his passion be a lighthouse for potential customers. While it may not be polished or on message, it is likely not going to be sterile and flat like most polished, on-message marketing efforts. To get a sense of what this evangelist might do for you, check out my interview with Betsy Weber, chief evangelist of TechSmith:part one and part two.
• Let content come from your company’s strength. We have a client where almost everybody in the company participates in the forum. Every employee is knowledgeable about the service offered, and they all become part of the marketing vehicle, giving tips and comments and escalating customer issues. Not only is it transparent, it’s content marketing at its most organic.
• Content marketing should ultimately be a two-way conversation between you and your customers. While an e-mail newsletter or a static Web page with persuasive copy is technically one-way, it shouldn’t sound like it is. Talk more about them and what they get than talking about yourself. Those who do nothing but talk about themselves just end up “wewe-ing” all over themselves. Try our online calculator that tells businesses how much they talk about themselves in their copy; it is one of our oldest content marketing vehicles and has remained popular for years.
• Don’t be pressured to reinvent the wheel. If you don’t already have one, start a simple e-mail newsletter. Don’t feel forced to pick something new and shiny like Twitter or the latest social media frenzy.
• Content that isn’t relevant to at least one profitable segment of potential customers isn’t content, it’s spam. Spam is boring. Creating relevant content often requires planning.

Final Say

Ultimately, content marketing is about optimizing the dialogue between a company and it customers. The better, more interesting the conversation is, the more attention it attracts and the more your customers are compelled to talk and buy.

How is the conversation going with your customers?

Earlier last month some hot air came from Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO Randall Rothenberg, who wants to prevent the Internet advertising economy from becoming “performance based.” This week provided another more disheartening statistic. Helen Leggatt, of BizReport, writes:

With the number of channels a marketer has to manage and monitor increasing, you’d think technology would be employed to make their job easier. Not so. It seems marketers are foregoing analytics to measure their online marketing campaigns…When asked about their use of measurement applications, less than half (47%) of the 1,545 American and British marketing professionals polled by Alterian said they currently use analytics to measure their online campaigns.

Sure, the shear number of those ignoring analytics in today’s marketplace is alarming, but it’s not all that surprising.

At first blush, one could conclude that site owners suffer from either arrogance or ignorance. Marketers either believe they don’t need analytics because they are smart enough to trust their gut (arrogance), or they don’t know what to do with them (ignorance). The Web analytics community has been split on this issue. Eric T. Peterson, Web analytics consultant, argues Web analytics is hard, while Google’s analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik argues Web analytics isn’t hard. This still doesn’t sufficiently explain why more than 50 percent of marketing professionals fail to integrate analytics into their marketing efforts. (No doubt, getting value out of Web analytics is complex, something I’ll address in a future column.)

Mitch Joel, author of “Six Pixels of Separation,” offers some valuable insight:

It’s hard to measure the success and efficacy of your Digital Marketing initiatives if we’re feeling like our own home base could use a little renovating and extreme makeover. The problem is that many people built their online presence with a one-time budget. While they may have factored in ongoing budget for Web hosting and occasional updates, this strategy has left them paralyzed.

The bigger problem I’ve encountered in company after company is that most have failed to make Web site optimization a part of ongoing business operations. And who can blame them? For many, analytics have failed to live up to the promise that analytics vendors have been selling. Many companies have “been there, done that,” honestly attempting to use analytics to improve and have seen very little result in comparison to their effort.

As I commented on Mitch’s blog:

I blame it on our ADD mentality. Campaigns are exciting and change frequently, providing us with our next, new, shiny object fascination. Most people’s websites are static and lack the ongoing imagination and efforts required to reap the benefits of continuous improvements.Most campaigns would perform better if people only realized how many times a visitor engages with your campaign and then abandons only to search or reach for your “home base” later. This recession will weed out many of those who don’t pay attention to this.

If only they had stuck with their effort to make Web analytics work.

Still, commitment alone could put you on a hamster wheel. How does one know when to stop a particular test, stop improving a particular element, or drop a complete design in favor of something new? You must also commit to learning. Learn about your visitors, why they do what they do, and how you can better give them what they need and want.

The companies that benefit most from analytics have a culture of optimization. Whether it is explicit effort or part of a company’s DNA, each of these has some sort of process or system for analyzing the data, generating recommendations, and most important executing improvements, learning, and starting the process all over again. This improves the ROI (define) of efforts and ends up paying for itself and much, much more.

Optimization using analytics causes an interesting dichotomy. It is a rather simple concept, and there are many valuable and impactful “simple” lessons to be learned. But it is also complex; you can go very deep in analysis. To get the most out of your analytics — or just your optimization efforts — develop a cost-effective, smart system for improving continuously.

Not Using Analytics?

You are running out of excuses. Let’s deal with some of the smaller ones.

• If arrogance is your problem, do nothing. Your competitors will soon overtake you.
• If ignorance is your problem, learn. A good start is to get good at using a free product, eventually you can pay for more.
• If budget is a problem, it doesn’t have to be. You can do all kinds of things for much less money than you would imagine. Some of them are even free.
• If resources are the problem, that’s OK. Just move forward at a slower pace. Optimize what you can as often as you can with the resources you have now. Soon you’ll catch up and surpass the arrogant company mentioned above.

Optimizing the Organization

Want to have a culture with a constant eye toward getting smarter and better? Here are a few things that your organization can do:

• Adopt an attitude that every action measured in analytics has an actual human being behind it. Don’t allow your optimization team or analyst treat your visitors like stats. Try starting by looking at them as personas.
• Don’t get overly addicted to shiny new tools and technologies, or even to marketing platforms. New isn’t always better. Here are a few wise words from the lovable venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki:
  Follow through on an issue until it is done or irrelevant. Many organizations set goals and even measure progress toward them. However, after a short time, some goals are no longer on the radar because people start focusing on the coolest and most interesting stuff. For example, fixing bugs in the current version of a software application is not as interesting as designing a new, breakthrough product — but your current customers think it is. Legend has it that Pat Riley, the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, measured stats of his players and posted each player’s progress on his locker.
• Commit to a culture of execution. “Execution is not an event — a onetime push toward achieving goals. Rather, it is a way of life,” says Kawasaki.

One of the most important things about improving is making it a way of life, so that it happens over and over.

What’s keeping you from using analytics to optimize your marketing?

And of course, the end of the year is always a good time to talk the fundamentals. This week, I want to discuss another conversion rate optimization basic: the call to action (CTA).

Two Types of Call to Actions

The most common thing that jumps to mind when we think about CTAs is the big CTA button. The less obvious, less famous is the textual CTA.

CTA buttons are those in-your-face buttons that excitedly point the way to your visitors taking a profitable action on your site. Their subtler sister, the textual CTA, usually shows up in the body of active window copy. Often it’s simply a standalone hyperlink; sometimes they show up as part of headers. Other times, they’re snuggled up against a product picture or a hero image, even in navigation.

Improving Call-to-Action Buttons

• Shape variations. There are rectangles, squares, ovals, circles, and irregular shapes (like Amazon, which blends an oval and a rectangle). Corners can be pointy or rounded. Is there a shape that works better for you?
• Colors. You have a world of colors to choose from; there’s really no wrong color.
• Non-graphical buttons. There are also non-graphical “add to cart” buttons created from plain text or simple HTML with the traditional gray background. These can be styled somewhat using CSS (define). Would plain and simple be the best way to go?
• Style variations. Two-dimensional or three-dimensional? With or without shadowing? Does your audience have a preference? Does the CTA stand out from other content on the page, or do other (less profitable) elements dilute the page?
• Icon variations. Little images of arrows, carts, baskets, or bags may help distinguish your buttons from the other elements around them. Is there an icon that makes sense for your business and improves conversion?
• Size variations. Larger isn’t always better. Will size matter?
• Legibility. The previous factors work in combination to affect the legibility of an “add to cart” button. Font choice, font size, and text/background contrast will also affect how readily a visitor identifies the CTA and acts on it. The possibilities are limitless.
• Location variations. Where to put your button: Above the fold? One above and one below? On the right or left or in the middle of the page? How far should you place it from neighboring elements?
• Wording. Just think about all the possible ways you can say “add to cart.” Or “contact me.” Or “sign up.” The words matter. For example, years ago we influenced Dell to change the words in its configurator from “Learn More” to “Help Me Choose,” which had a significant impact.

Improving Textual Call to Actions

A ClickZ column I wrote in 2003 offers a quick guide to get you started:

The clearer the explicit benefit of clicking on a hyperlink, the more likely a visitor will click.

[CTA links] should be constructed with an imperative, an implied benefit of what visitors can expect when they click, and a clear sense of the information on the landing page. Which link best conveys what the visitor will find after the click?

• Find out which after-school program is best for your child.
• Find out which after-school program is best for your child.
• Find out which after-school program is best for your child.

The first link implies the landing page lists programs. The second tells you the landing page probably lists after-school programs. The third tells you the landing page contains content that will help you decide which after-school program is best for your child.

Research has shown that the best links are between 7 and 12 words, but I prefer four to seven words for SEO (define) purposes.

While textual CTAs are all about the copy and the words, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to consider the copy on your buttons. Effective button copy and effective textual link copy have the same characteristics. So don’t forget to apply these CTA copy tips to your button copy as well.

Do You Have an Eye for Good Call to Actions?

Let’s see how you fare. Take a look at this page on IconFactory.com. These guys aren’t clients of ours, but we can safely deduce that the two primary CTAs are “buy now” and “download.” How well are these guys doing with their CTAs? What would you do differently? What would you like to test? Would you lay out the page differently? If so, how?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below, then get to work on your own call to actions.

Most people don’t want to draw that sharp line of distinction, and it’s why their marketing efforts blend into the clutter.

Discernible edges and silhouettes allow us to visually “grip” an object and separate figure from ground.  Eliminate those edges and you’ll effectively camouflage yourself.

In the picture above, notice how the legs present a solid silhouette and are easily identified, while the man’s upper body camouflage breaks up his silhouette and blurs his edges into the background of trees and snow.  As a result, it’s much harder to make out his his torso and arms.

Like our eyes, our minds also depend on edges and silhouettes.  We define by giving parameters, mentally grasping a concept by its boundaries.  Without the “edges” of contrasting reference points, a concept or term remains ambiguous at best.

That’s why grabbing after an “infinite” market and seeking to be all things to all people ends up camouflaging one’s brand and messaging; without contrast it all just blurs into the background.

Want to stand out?  Sharply define the edges between you and your competitors.

The better you do this, the more strongly you’ll turn-off some customers.  But wouldn’t you rather powerfully persuade some of your market than be overlooked by all of it?

Just follow the example of this doctor:

I found this ad in my local newspaper and was immediately struck by the bold headline:

“You don’t want me to be your family doctor.”

Pretty ballsy headline for a doctor, huh?  Wouldn’t you feel compelled to read more about this doctor with the courage to so brazenly declare what he wasn’t?

Having gained the reader’s attention, the body copy further explains: “Neurosurgery is one of the few medical specialties for which I am well-suited.  I am not warm and fuzzy.  I could never be successful as a pediatrician or in a family practice – no one would come back a second time.  But I am very good at what I do.”

Dr. Goodman then substantiates his claimed expertise with a list of very impressive professional qualifications and accomplishments, rounded off with some examples of his extreme commitment to surgical excellence and his patients’ well-being.

While his professional qualifications are truly outstanding, most readers would never have read them without Dr. Goodman’s use of reverse camouflage in his headline.  Saying what he wasn’t allowed him to stand out amidst the clutter.

So here’s 3 sure-fire ways to reverse-camouflage your messaging.

1.    Get yourself an enemy and/or reject a reasonable alternative position
Nothing fires the blood quite so much as declaring what (or who) you stand against.  But you get no points for tearing down straw men; rejecting a reasonable alternative position puts teeth into your message.

2.    Present a tightly focused perspective
Once you’ve narrowed the group of customers that you’re most interested in attracting, focus your messaging to speak most directly to their felt needs, desires, and frustrations.  People who don’t share those experiences will feel excluded, but your core audience will feel an instant connection.  Both will instantly recognize you.  Tim Miles offers a brilliant example of this on his “About Us” page.

3.    Explain what costs you’re willing to bare and admit the downside to your offer/product.
This one is more about credibility than definition, but amidst a background of ad-speak, solid credibility acts as its own form of reverse camouflage.  Plus, you don’t just want to be seen, right?  You want to be believed as well.

Finally, if all else fails, you can always use your new-found knowledge of camouflage to escape weekend chores (just ditch the boots in favor of camo socks)

What simple statement about your business or brand — just a quick, clear sentence or two at most — tells your prospects that you are the only alternative for them? Sounds like a response should just jump out at you. Yet most businesses (on- and offline) cannot provide an answer that simply rolls off their tongues or, even more appropriately in the case of e-commerce, appears on their home pages.By USP, or unique selling proposition, I don’t mean a slogan or a phrase that will appear in your advertising, although that’s one potential use for it. Rather I mean the concise and memorable phrase that answers your prospect’s always-implicit question, “Why should I do business with you and not somebody else?”

A unique selling proposition is mucho importante. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Linda Bustos, an e-commerce consultant at the Get Elastic blog wrote:

Why should your ideal customer purchase from you rather than from anybody else?I would even go so far as to ask yourself, what one thing about your company, your product selection, your customer service or your customer loyalty is so compelling, that even if a product was out of stock, or some functionality were broken on your site, a customer would stick around and buy something?

The folks at Marketing Experiments believe so strongly in the importance of the clarity of the value proposition that Dr. Flint McGlaughlin was bold enough to say if you get your value proposition right, you can get many other things wrong on your landing pages and still improve conversion dramatically.

Several years ago at our company, we adjusted the term a bit by replacing “selling” with “value.” What we didn’t change was our work with clients, helping them clarify or even create a unique value proposition for use on their site (among hundreds of other factors).

I was reminded of this recently when our newest conversion analyst and one of his clients turned in their most recent optimization success story. A single test on this client’s unique value proposition increased overall conversion rate by 33.8 percent. What did this client do that worked so well? It hired a good writer (at our suggestion) who wrote several suggested unique value propositions, as this company didn’t have one at all. Then we tested the several unique value propositions, until we had a clear winner. Not only did our client see a conversion rate increase, it gained customer insight that can be used to optimize other site areas.

Every Landing Page Needs One

In recent years, I’ve even started suggesting clients use unique campaign propositions (UCP). These are meant to reinforce your offer from banner ad or PPC (define) campaigns by enhancing the landing-page scent. When visitors take their precious eight-second first impression, you want them to know why they should buy from you and not your competitors.

Strengthen Your Unique Value Proposition

Creating a unique value or campaign proposition isn’t for chumps or posers. Your value proposition must be clear, relevant, and easy to understand. Here’s a quick, easy process for writing a more powerful unique value proposition:

• Ask your personas what they value most about your product/service/campaign; make a list. (If you don’t have personas, you can ask a few dozen of your most faithful customers. Yes, you can ask both if you want).
• On your list, look for repeating themes and list those separately.
• Hand the list to a good writer. Ask that person to write 5 to 10 versions of a potential unique value proposition based on the list.
• Test three to five of the most promising unique value propositions.
• Pick the best-performing unique value proposition.

How strong is your unique value proposition? It could be the key to a better conversion rate.

Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.

And this sage Homerism is hard to beat:

Oh, so they have Internet on computers now!

The lovable Homer Simpson can be held up as an example to the kids for many things, but probably not Homer on a diet. He isn’t the diet-and-exercise type. His strict regime of beer and donuts and babysitting day after day a nuke reactor does not a healthy lifestyle make.

So what does this have to do with Web site conversion rate optimization?

More than you would think.

Optimizing a Web site or campaign is shockingly similar to dieting and getting fit. Let’s spend a few moments evaluating how your conversion rate diet is going.

Are you having success? Or are you on the Homer Simpson diet? Doh!

Getting Fat and Tipsy on the Data

This is something we are seeing increasingly more of, as analytics tools are now mainstream. Data are flowing from a keg and everyone is taking a mug. Some take several mugs. Many companies are data happy and mistake data for insight or, even worse, for optimization success.

Data can be abused like a keg of Duff beer. To make sure you aren’t doing this, remember those numbers are people, not lifeless data. Learn to get insight into customer behavior, or those data will go straight to your midsection and not contribute fully to your ability to move more visitors to take a conversion action.

Sometimes, these folks don’t take their eyes off the scale, celebrating conversion rate increases that are well within the standard deviation (and thus likely meaningless). They are get depressed about minor losses (again, all within the standard deviation).

Chowing Down Empty Calories

Anthony Garcia, our lead consultant, likes to joke that he never met a donut he didn’t like. I can relate. Thing is they have little nutritional value. Donuts are the poster child for empty-calorie foods. (Sorry, Homer and Anthony, they aren’t one of the four food groups.)

A high-donut diet is similar to living on cheap (sometimes not so cheap) traffic. The high is temporary, and before you know it you need more and more traffic until you can’t survive without it.

The good news is you can work off some of that excess traffic by trimming the fat on your Web site and increasing your conversion rate.

Engaging in Lightweight Lifting

Can you imagine Homer Simpson at the gym? Can you imagine him jogging? He probably couldn’t make it out of the driveway without getting winded. Still, if he did jog halfway around the block or lift a small weight for one or two reps, he would claim an exercising victory. A lot of companies do this, too. They run a test, optimize a single landing page, or even give full-force optimization a try for a month or two. Then they stop, winded and weary.

Usually these companies say they don’t see the value. Well, how could they? Still, some expect a miracle conversion-rate increase with very little work. Or they believe that trying a few things will get them a huge return, and if it doesn’t come right away they give up. What a shame.

Homer on diet would do the same, saying he tried dieting and exercise and got no results. But was Homer every truly on a diet?

Optimizing and dieting are both simple in principle. Dieting is about taking in fewer calories and burning more. Optimizing is about getting customer insight, applying a change based on that learning, and starting the process over again, like running on a treadmill.

Optimizing and keeping off the donuts take work and a commitment to get results. Is a lack of work or commitment keeping you from getting the results you want?

I’m a big fan of dieting Homer’s way. I love food, and my exercise regimen consists of carrying my MacBook Pro from the desk to the sofa, then back again. Still, I don’t want to optimize Homer Simpson-style. If you want actual results you shouldn’t, either. Let me know if you need some additional diet or optimization advice.

Most people failed by mentioning brands that were built well before the 10-year limit.  But one reader suggested Airborne, and I had to agree that it met the criteria, even if it was the exception that proved the rule.

How so?

Well, first off, Airborne basically invented its own product category.  Emergen-C existed before then but wasn’t widely available outside health food stores, and wasn’t fully marketed as a cold or flu-preventative.  And this new product category made substandard product performance extraordinarily hard to detect for the average consumer.  You took Aiborne and still got sick? Well, you probably didn’t have it nearly as bad as you would have if you hadn’t taken it, right? Or you didn’t take it soon enough, and so on.

Second, Airborne owed more of its rapid growth to a fabulously sticky mythology combined with extraordinary PR than to outright advertising.

The myth is that Airborne was the unique discovery and formulation of a 2^nd Grade School Teacher, Victoria Knight-McDowell, and that the demand for the product by friends and local merchants was so great that the product just naturally grew from a home-brewed recipe into a national brand.

If one were to evaluate this story in terms of Chip and Dan Heath’s SUCCESS principles, the story is:

Simple – It’s a classic create-a-better-mousetrap-and-achieve-fame-and-fortune story.

Unexpected – A grade school teacher turned entrepreneurial genius and final vanquisher of the common cold? Check that one off.

Concrete – Lots of great details here, ranging from 2^nd grader’s notoriously snotty noses to the mental image of the teacher-slash-herbalist cooking up a “super weapon” to combat the common cold.

Credibility – It’s practically a self-made Sinatra test: whose immune systems are more challenged than grade school teachers?  If Airborne works for them, it’ll likely work for anyone, right?  Plus, until ABC News blew their cover, Airborne also had that oh-so-conclusive “scientific” test to back them up.

Emotional – A teacher achieving financial wealth and fame through inventive problem solving definitely has emotional appeal. It’s a modern day Horatio Alger story!

Story – Not only is this a story, it’s one of the most powerful kinds of stories: a creation myth.

Is it any wonder that Victoria’s husband, a successful screenwriter, managed to recognize a great story when he saw one and decided to invest heavily in the company and it’s marketing.

Although Airborne did invest in advertising, it owes far more of it’s growth to Oprah and other great PR than to any traditional ad campaign.

The story behind Airborne made the product an easy pitch to media, and the PR lent the product more credibility than straight advertising ever would have, making the tablets an even hotter commodity.

Yes, Airborne built it’s brand success on the back of marketing, in spite of its rather dubious performance. But, it had no real competitors, and the subjective experience it delivered – as a result of its creation myth and fabulous PR – was more than good enough to allow for continued growth.

In short, if the rule is that a product has to be remarkable for marketing efforts to gain traction, then Airborne is a mediocre product that proves the rule, because what was ultimately marketed was not the unremarkable effervescent tablets, but the remarkably sticky creation story behind them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s the question: what do you want to bet that Apple has been just waiting – even itching – for Microsoft to release that kind of response to their “I’m a Mac” campaign?

Why do I ask that?  Because I’d bet anything that Mac’s marketing was smart enough to engage in what Mike Smock has termed The Three Move Set.  You see, when you try to take market share from a competitor, it’s usually a fair bet that they’ll react with some kind of countermeasure.  And that means smart marketers think at least far enough in advance to consider their response to the competition’s countermeasures.  Ideally, one wants to make sure this response is decisive, or at least hurts the competition as much as the initial challenge.  Here’s how Mike breaks it down:

Move 1: Challenger attacks Leader

Move 2: Leader reacts to Challenger.

Move 3: Challenger reacts to Leader.

And here’s how to view the current Mac/PC ad campaigns in light of that:

• Move 1: Mac challenges PC by personifying Macs as hip, cool, and reliably workable and PCs as nerdy, problematic (especially with the release of Vista), and behind the curve in user experience.

• Move 2: Microsoft responds by creating an ad that actively evokes Apple’s framing of the issue and that essentially says, hey, PCs are cool, too.

• Move 3: Mac slams Microsoft for covering up real problems with Vista by creating fancy advertising campaigns.

Do you see?  Most strategists could have – and should have – seen this one coming.  Apple goads you into advertising to respond to their ads and then they slam you for being more concerned with creating ad campaigns than fixing your software, as in the case with the ad I posted yesterday or Apple’s PC Bake Sale ad:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So what should have (or could have) Microsoft done?

Well, leaving aside the obvious bit about getting Vista right before releasing it to the public, they probably should have:

1. Responded to Mac in a matter of weeks, or at least months, rather than years.  This one is sort of a no-brainer.
2. Come up with a response that re-framed the issue rather than responding to Mac’s frame.  Saying, “I’m not a dweeb” is a bit like saying “I’m not a crook” – it just forces people to think of you within the frame of dweeb/not dweeb (or Crook/Not Crook).  This is actually a well known phenomenon that is actively used by modern politicians.  Just as asking people not to think of white bears is actually counterproductive, so too is Microsoft’s denial of Mac’s characterization of PCs.
3. Possibly take a page out of Trout and Ries’ playbook and attack the weakness inherent in Mac’s strength.  In this case, it’s Apple’s closed system and (lower but still there) price premium.  William Thomas alluded to the limitations of a closed system in a comment to my previous post when he compared Linux to catching and gutting your own fish and Apple to ordering fish at the restaurant.  And I’m guessing here, but it’s also what Microsoft might be getting at with the “Life without walls” slogan.  Of course, Microsoft will have to be as creative and sharp witted in pressing this point as Mac has been with their campaigns, and, well, their ad above hardly qualifies.  The slogan is nothing but an afterthought.

So what do you think Microsoft should do?

My goal is never to be a doomsayer, but rather to be prepared for the reality of the market — good or bad. And that includes recommending common sense actions to shore you up and provide a bullet proof vest for more difficult times.

Reality is, when down times arrive, most companies first look to the marketing department to trim costs. This is not because marketing has the least value; it’s typically because marketers usually do a poor job of tying marketing to direct revenue. This is easily fixed.

Conversion rate optimization should be the last thing you should consider trimming. Here is why.

Shot Across the Bow

We are already beginning to see signs of the economy slowing, “The New York Times” reports on brick-and-mortar sales:

Sales at Dillard’s dropped 12 percent, compared with a 7 percent decline last year. J. C. Penney’s same-store sales fell 12.4 percent, compared with a decline of 3.7 percent for the period a year ago. Sales at Kohl’s decreased 5.5 percent, compared with a 3.2 percent decrease last year. At Bon-Ton Stores, same-store sales decreased 4.6 percent, and they declined 3 percent at Target.

And, here is Heather Daugherty, research director at Hitwise, discussing the Web economy:

At Hitwise, we have been tracking these various economic indicators very closely and are now seeing a similar trend in visitation to the websites of retailers, particularly during the past few weeks where the economy has become top-of-mind for the majority of Americans. Last week, traffic to a custom category of 500 retailers (excludes auctions, classifieds, DVD rentals, and book/music/DVD of the month clubs) declined 5% from the same week during the previous year.

The number above that is causing online marketers to lose sleep is the 5 percent decline in visits. For most of us, a decrease in traffic means an equal decrease in sales.

So what happened to this traffic? Did all of these retailers decide they needed less traffic? Did they stop buying ads? A few perhaps, but not all 500 retailers. This is direct result of consumer’s behaving differently due to economic concerns.

Could your company survive a steep decline in traffic? A 10 percent or 20 percent decline?

Take Control of What You Can

For starters, marketers must acknowledge they have far less control than they think. They must also get a firmer grasp on what they do actually control.

You do not have control of the economy. While you may have some influence on the search engines, they are not under your control either.

So now is a good time to get serious about what you do control: the customer experience. By optimizing the experience you reduce the risk of taking a steep incline.

If you need to understand the math or you are trying to get buy in from your organization have them read this column.

Tying Efficiencies to Dollars

Last but not least, you should not be using traffic or even conversion numbers exclusively. Everything you do should be tied to a dollar value. Not only will this show the value of your work, it could also help you sort out priorities.

What are you doing differently in light of the economy? Let me know.

*Cross posted in ClickZ.

1. Statbrain – Using several sources, Statbrain’s algorithm computes the number of visitors to a website based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any hit-counter information. Use this as a rough relative benchmark of your traffic to theirs. First run your website and compare the results given by StatBrain to your actual results to get a sense of its accuracy in your category. Figure out what the multiplier is and then try it on a competitor.

2. AideRSS – Find out which of your competitors’ blog posts and topics are engaging people. This should provide you with a list of topics you should be covering. Engagement doesn’t necessarily mean your competitor’s opinion is right or even agreed with — but it does mean the engaged people are interested in the topic and therefore why not your opinion on the topic.

3. FeedCompare – If you use Feedburner to track your rss subscribers you can compare the size of your feed to others. Just like in #1 above, figure out your own multiplier and then compare it to the competition.

4. Xinu Returns – Xinu Runs a report from multiple sites to tell you how well a site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking sites and other technical details. How well are you stacking up against your 5 biggest competitors?

5. Google Trends For Websites – Enter up to five topics and see how often those topics been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. You can learn more on how to use this from our friend, Avinash Kaushik.

6. Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Again, Avinash explains how to use this well.

7. Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast tool – This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.

8. Microsoft’s Search Funnels – Customers often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences. This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers’ search sequences. Search Engine guru Mike Grehan explains the value of these query chains.

9. WayBackMachine – Go back in web history to see how your competitors’ site has changed through the years. Look for the things that have stayed consistent, because those might have been the most successful. In the same vein, what have you changed on your own site during that time? It’s easy to lose track, particularly of your own work, and to think of your current site as “how it’s always been”.

10. Web Page Speed Analyzer – Compare the download speed of your pages with those of your competitors to see which are loading quicker. Quicker loading pages tend to have an advantage at converting visitors. This analyzer provides a detail analysis of the page elements. For a rough comparison of two pages side by side try WebSlug. And, WebWait is great when you want to get accurate speed results from the visitors perspective because WebWait pulls down the entire website into your browser, so it takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and image loading which other tools ignore.

11. Web Page Readability – By comparing the readability score of web pages you can optimize your writing and make sure that you aren’t creating overly complex sentences and paragraphs for your audience.

12. Attention Meter – Attentionmeter gives you a quick snapshot comparing any websites you want (traffic) using Alexa, Compete, and Quancast.

13. Websitegrader – Website Grader is a free tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. Also worth checking out Twittergrader to check on your competitors’ twitter accounts.

14. Google Alerts – set up searches for your competitors, key employees, and keywords to monitor their activity.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it: Try some (or all) of the above techniques and report back on your intriguing espionage! This tape will self-destruct in 10 clicks.

Shhhhh… care to share your spying secrets? What tools or techniques do you use?

[Editor's note: the author of this post is now blogging at bryaneisenberg.com]

Landing page optimization and conversion rate improvements are no longer simply buzzwords. The rising cost of driving online traffic means marketers are paying more for less return on their ad dollars. To keep up, online marketers must roll up their sleeves and dive into conversion optimization. Optimizing your landing pages and your website is a proven means of increasing your conversion rates and realizing improved ROI. Google’s Website Optimizer makes it available to anyone who wants to start testing.

1. Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer

The easy-to-understand, in-depth information in Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Web Optimizer, by FutureNow’s Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar, will help you understand how to set up website optimization tests and improve your conversion rates. Learn the theory behind the testing, understand Google Web Optimizer click reports, discover the “why” of clicks, and decipher the valuable data.

By the time you finish reading this book, no matter what your skill level, you will have learned how to set up tests and improve crucial page components with the help of real-world case studies and examples.

If you haven’t read the book yet, perhaps you’d enjoy reading a sample chapter (PDF, about 2.5 Mb)

2. FREE *3rd Party* WordPress Plug-in For Google Website Optimizer

Future Now, Inc. worked very closely with blog integration specialists, ContentRobot, to create a WordPress plug-in that integrates Google Website Optimizer into a WordPress blog or blog-powered website. Using the plug-in makes it easy for anyone using WordPress to test headlines, copy or images. To learn more about the plugin, visit the official Website Optimizer Plugin for WordPress page. A direct download is available from ContentRobot and mirrored on GrokDotCom.

3. Getting Started with Multivariate testing?

There are several factors that hold people back before they begin A/B or Multivariate testing. If your organization isn’t testing, hopefully we can help you realize that testing isn’t scary. In fact, what our clients have seen once they do start is that NOT testing is what’s really scary. Read Start Multivariate Testing: 7 Critical Questions.

4. A/B Split Testing on Lower-Traffic Sites

Dr. Ralph Wilson of Web Marketing Today spent a few minutes interviewing FutureNow’s Bryan Eisenberg about testing on sites that have little traffic. You can view the video below. You may also be interested in reading more about the hierarchy of optimization when you are done viewing the video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A good follow up to this is Top 7 Tips for Optimizing Low-Traffic Websites.

FREE Webinars About Google Website Optimizer

5. Landing Page Optimization: Headlines & Calls to Action

In this webinar, Bryan Eisenberg and Tom Leung, Product Manager for Google Website Optimizer, discuss how to improve your headlines and calls to action, including several case studies. They also discuss how to get testing started in your big organization. View the Landing Page Optimization: Headlines & Calls to Action webinar.

6. Landing Page Optimization: Confidence and Trust Building Elements

In this webinar, Bryan Eisenberg explored how a business might focus on testing confidence and trust building elements, a few good industry examples, a few really bad industry examples, and finished by providing valuable insight into structuring your tests. Tom Leung, from Google, then takes over, walking the audience through how easy it can be to setup a test in Google Website Optimizer. He finished with a hands-on demo of creating a test. View the Landing Page Optimization: Confidence and Trust Building Elements webinar.

7. I Know I Should Be Always Be Testing But…

Join Bryan Eisenberg and Elastic Path co-founder Jason Billingsley for this information packed webinar. You can read the recap or view the video.

8. Phone Webinar – Website Optimizer: What Should I Test?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Whether you are an e-commerce retailer or a business-to-business site, we are sure you will learn great tips for how to improve your landing pages through testing.

9. Podcast: Bryan Eisenberg Interviews Avinash Kaushik

As part of the research for our book, Always Be Testing, I had the pleasure to chat with several people about testing and how testing lives in their corporate culture. This one, with Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google, blogger at Occam’s Razor and author of the incredibly popular Web Analytics an Hour a Day is not to be missed. Take some time to listen to my interview with Avinash.

Click here to listen to Bryan Eisenberg chat with Avinash Kaushik

(To download the interview for use on your ipod, etc., right-click here and “save as”.)

10. Podcast: Bryan Eisenberg Interviews Bernardo de Albergaria

Take some time to listen to my interview with Bernardo de Albergaria, VP & GM of eCommerce, Citirix Online, as we discuss testing and building out a data-driven/testing culture. He is responsible for selling products and the online experience for products like Gotomeeting and GotoMyPC.

Click here to listen to Bryan Eisenberg interview Bernardo de Albergaria

(To download the interview for use on your ipod, etc., right-click here and “save as”.)

11. Podcast of Interview of Tom Leung, Business Product Manager of Google Website Optimizer

On GrokDotCom.com Tom Leung discusses the ins and outs of Google’s latest product to help websites and advertisers.
Part 1

Click here to listen to Part 1 of Tom Leung, Google and Bryan

Part 2

Click here to listen to Part 2 of Tom Leung, Google and Bryan

To download Part 1 of Google Website Optimizer interview the MP3 click here

To download Part 2 of Google Website Optimizer interview the MP3 click here

12. 64 Tips for Getting Started with Google Website Optimizer

Are you looking for some testing ideas? Anthony Garcia, co-author of Which Sells Best? and Contact Me or Submit? provides you with 64 Tips for Getting Started with Google Website Optimizer.

13. Subscribe to the Conversion Rate Marketing Blog – GrokDotCom

GrokDotCom is a marketing blog that is focused on marketing optimization, improving online conversion rates, search engine marketing, web analytics, word of mouth, persuasive website design, and of course landing page optimization. You have many subscription options; you can get the latest content by email (your choice of daily, weekly or monthly) or by RSS. Choose your subscription options…

Some blog posts about A/B & Multivariate testing include:

How to Prioritize Your Optimization

Testing Add-to-Cart Buttons: Stuck in the Middle With You

Google Website Optimizer: 7 Powerful Tests

Push Your Customers’ Buttons

Hitting the Landing Page Optimization Wall

Does Your Testing Organization Have A Gag Reflex?

Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart

Big Impact, Small Changes on Amazon

Speed! Why Optimization Should Be Sexy

How to Get Buy-in for Conversion Rate Optimization

Why You Can’t Copy From Amazon

14. Subscribe to the Official Google Website Optimizer Blog

The official Google Website Optimizer blog, will keep you up to date product news, and industry insights.

15. Google Website Optimizer website

Website Optimizer, Google’s free website testing and optimization tool, allows you to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without spending a cent. Using Website Optimizer to test and optimize site content and design, you can quickly and easily increase revenue and ROI whether you’re new to marketing or an expert. Sign up at: Google.com/Websiteoptimizer.

16. What is Continuous Improvement?

Join Dr. Ralph Wilson, Jim Sterne and I, as we explain in this 7 minute video what “continuous incremental improvement” means and how to get started with it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What other resources have you found useful?

With that level of “targeting,” it’s anyone’s guess. There just isn’t enough information available.

But if George Costanza, the white middle-income male New Yorker between age 30 and 44 from “Seinfeld” picks up the wallet, everyone knows exactly what he’ll do.

He’ll keep the money.

By allowing you to imagine their concerns, reactions, and questions, personas allow you to better plan marketing interactions and messaging. Personas are critical to lead generation Web sites, specifically those that want to engage their suspects and prospects in a sales dialogue online and offline.

Personas vs. Segmentation/Demographics

When building personas for your lead gen or demand generation Web site, psychographics are typically more profitable than demographics.

Psychographics give insight into how an individual perceives the world, their belief structures, and some of their core personality traits. Psychographics, in the form of personality theory and motivational research, have a long documented effectiveness at predicting decision-making styles and behaviors — including buying behaviors.

Demographics, on the other hand, are only loosely correlated to behavior and often horrible in predicting marketing response.

Personas tell us how to plan and have a conversation. Demographics mostly tell us where to have that conversation. Both are important.

Using Personas to Take Action and Build Persuasion Scenarios

Web sites and online interactions especially benefit from this by allowing copywriters to plan the interactivity of click paths, the link structure for embedded hyperlinks, and the messaging required for increased persuasive momentum and conversions.

“Actionable personas” have easily predictable and imaginable conversations and reactions, like good fictional characters. They have to generate empathy and engage the imagination.

Meet Melissa Putnam, 23, Sales Assistant, $32,000 Annual Income

Melissa, a newbie at her job, was just asked by the sales manager to research and suggest some potential sales training vendors. Melissa is a people person; she likes to build strong relationships and relies on good first impressions to get relationships off to a strong start. She wants to make a splash and impress the boss.

The Brooks Group, a sales training company, offers all sorts of customized training, many of which would be a perfect match for Melissa’s needs.

Let’s peek at how we planned the interaction on the site for Melissa’s style and needs.

Melissa is a “humanistic,” meaning she’s interested most in relationships. So as she arrives at the Brooks Group Web site, she’s immediately presented with two links to the About Us page, both at the top and left-hand navigation.

When she clicks through, she’s presented with a page that addresses her motivations about midway through, and notices the header “Meet the team.” You also see a picture of the founder, and a link in the active window that reads ‘real coaches.’ This is all Melissa speak.

After she clicks that link, she arrives at the “Working with Brooks Group” page. There’s a lot of content here that is virtual red meat for her. Here she reads a little about coaching and clicks the link near the bottom of the page that reads, “Contact one of our sales coaches, and they’ll talk you through a typical training deployment.”

Melissa is on her way to becoming a lead.

If you click around the site acting as Melissa, you’ll find other paths for her to follow, all leading toward a conversion event, giving her several opportunities to call or fill out the lead form. You’ll find links and elements designed and planned exclusively for her humanistic style persona.

If you’re astute, you’ll notice that Melissa isn’t the only persona accounted for on the site.

Meet Charlie “Nubs” Harrison, 45, Sales Manager, $90,000 Annual Income

Charlie, a former top salesperson, was just promoted to sales manager. He’s starting to doubt he made the right decision. His quote: “Managing these people is like herding cats.”

Charlie is a take-action, spontaneous type. He doesn’t like to waste time and he’s in pain. His sales people are driving him crazy.

Since Charlie has little patience, the first and most visible link in the active window was planned for him. He might also be interested in first learning about the company, Unlike Melissa, he’s looking more for credibility and experience than a relationship.

On the “about us” page, a link is planted just for him that reads, “the ability to manage sales rather than micromanage sales people.” Score for a Charlie type visitor!

As he follows that link, he arrives at the “Herd Your Sales Cats” page that is rich with Charlie language and content intended to speak to his pain. Near the bottom is a link that reads, “Getting started with the Brooks Group is easy.”

Here are things you can do for your personas to better plan your online lead gen interactions.

• Speak to temperaments such as humanistic. When you have content for several on the same page, put elements links and copy for the impatient competitive and spontaneous types higher up on the page, humanistics in the middle, and provide all the deeper details last for your methodical personas. Methodical types are not afraid of reading, so let them at it.
• Account for buying cycles. Ask what your personas need at each stage of the buying process. If they’re early in the buying cycle, they don’t know what they need or how to buy your product. If in the middle, they know approximately what they need. And finally, those in the late stage know exactly what they want. Provide copy, links, and elements for all three stages. In a recent column, I showed how Marketo was trying to convert outside the context of an early stage buyer.
• Understand sales complexity. You need to know how your personas relate to four measurements of complexity and provide content that addresses the questions and issues they face. One persona may have a greater felt need (Charlie), while another needs consensus (Melissa).

You might be thinking, wow, this is a lot of work.

Yup. But we can help you get these great results.

Being purposeful and prepared to deal with your prospects is always sweat-inducing work. But with a good plan, the sweat breeds greater conversion.

Bottom line for the Brooks Group: it doubled its leads by planning using persuasion scenarios, components that lead a visitor segment to participate in a conversion action.

* Cross posted from ClickZ.

And please, I beg thee, take your own political goggles off for a few minutes and join me as I take you on a tour of online marketing done well. The fact that we’re talking about a marketing effort headed by a politician running for the highest office is incidental.

Regardless of where you stand politically, even the most jaded pundit admits Sen. Obama’s campaign has built an online apparatus that would make most online businesses execs drool. In both scope and execution, there are few that equal it.

Those of us in the businesses universe can swipe a few lessons by observing the Obama online effort.

Several articles, like this, outline some tactics engaged in by the Obama team. But I want to sort a few of these and show you how they fall into a pattern of a stronger high-level strategy.

Putting People First

It doesn’t take much time on the Barack Obama Web site to realize that it’s focused on building relationships with people. Wording like “Find an Event Near You” reveals a visitor focus. While I was visiting the site, I found several active window Flash banners. One of them highlights the benefits of making a small donation; the other is a simple call to action allowing you to click a button and send a message to Obama’s new vice presidential pick.

Further down the page, Obama reaches out to Hillary Clinton supporters and sends them to a page where they can learn more about Obama in their own context, learn about the issues, and even invite others to the Obama cause. This is great example of a persuasion scenario done well.

The Obama machine understands what motivates people. If you engage the Obama site, you have the sense that you’re joining a team with a cause. You feel like you have a chance to go on the inside and look around, build a few relationships, and be a part of something bigger than you are. This is a powerful human motivation. Maybe that’s why it has motivated millions to donate to his cause.

By contrast, the John McCain Web site has good content and several prominent calls to action but little of it feels tied together to bigger purpose beyond simply helping McCain. There is no sense of WIIFM (define).

Using Engagement as a Success Measure

The team dedicated to maintaining Obama’s YouTube videos has it exactly right. While most social media jockeys are focused on views and traffic, this team is focused on a more profitable metric for the campaign: participation and engagement. In other words, viewers are engaging the campaign and taking action, like signing up to volunteer, joining the conversation, even making a contribution. Kate Albright-Hanna, who runs Obama’s YouTube video team, told the “Washington Post“:

Here, we don’t worry about how many views our videos get. That’s not the priority. One of our goals is to get people talking about what’s going on in their lives and why they’re supporting Barack — and hopefully not only will they watch the videos but also comment on them and forward them to relatives and friends and co-workers.

Possessing a Longer-Term Vision

Last Saturday, the Obama team made a small note in history by officially announcing Obama’s vice presidential pick by text message. Many pundits questioned the move, making the case that the text message platform was too small for such a big announcement. They felt this decision would squander a big opportunity to reach a larger audience. This is beside the point.

The real wisdom of the announcement is that thousands, maybe millions, signed up to be notified by text message.

Now the Obama campaign has a database of mobile numbers it can text in the future and use this communication medium to mobilize people on Election Day, or even before and after. Obama can now speak to a huge, engaged audience wherever they may be, right on their cell phones.

That’s thinking beyond the short term. Score.

Staying Customer Focused on the Micro Level

On the well-executed site, there are sign-up forms for several types of visitor conversions: events, e-mail lists, volunteer lists, and even a my.barackobama.com network that is a MySpace/Facebook type application for Obama supporters to connect.

Each form is presented clearly, is easy to fill out, and are among some of the best forms I’ve seen online. The Obama Web design team has done everything it can to get the site out of the way and let people sign up easily for anything they might be interested in.

Call-to-action buttons on the site are clear, large, easy to see, and generally worded well. You know exactly what you are doing when you click them.

Leveraging Technology, Not Just Using It

The Obama camp clearly understands what people do online. And it seems to be using social media technology well. Obama has a presence on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and every other relevant 2.0 site.

You simply cannot ignore this presence.

For example, the Flickr account sports a slew of albums updated daily with pics from behind the scenes, all with descriptive captions. Again you get the sense that you can get inside the campaign.

Heck, Sen. Obama has overtaken Kevin Rose on Twitter.

Obama has even launched a site to address all the negative rumors and e-mail messages floating around the Internet about him.

The effectiveness of how the campaign uses the e-mail medium is impressive and probably worth a column all by itself.

Maintaining Consistency

This is easy in concept but hard for a large organization to execute.

Logos, fonts, and color palettes are consistent everywhere you look. Even the podium at the Democratic National Convention sports Obama’s font and colors. The consistent look and feel of the campaign touch points is impressive, and you get the sense that the campaign is a well-oiled machine. What kind of confidence do you believe that instills in visitors and supporters?

Conclusion

If you can ignore the politics and imagine the Obama campaign as a business like any other, you can’t help but admire its execution of a well thought-out plan to reach and engage people in the campaign. Ask yourself: how can you deploy these principles in your online marketing effort to better result? These are the same principle we use when we deploy persuasion architecture in companies.

Whether Obama can translate this into an election win is yet to be seen. The other question that remains: can you take this type of online grass-roots machine into a political office and use it influence change while you are in office? As a marketer, not a political animal, it will be interesting to watch.

And for the record, I am officially endorsing this man for president of the United States.

*Cross-posted on ClickZ.

But then where does that leave broad-based gender differences and reality-based demographic information?  For instance, women make or influence 85% of all consumer purchasing decisions and control the finances in 53% of US households. Actually, to me, that last statistic seems low. If “controlling the finances” means balancing the checkbook and paying the bills, I’d bet far more than 53% of the household finances are controlled by women, either way, that’s a lot of checking accounts in female hands.

And that brings me to the new Mint.com redesign.  Bryan Eisenberg turned me on to Patrick Sullivan’s analysis of both the old and new Mint.com websites over at his Edit Weapon blog. Great stuff to be sure, and his analysis turned me onto a miniature (and admittedly non-scientific) trend: most guys I talked to didn’t like the new mint redesign as well as the old (beloved) website.  And yet the new site was outperforming the old site by 20% according to some accounts. What gives?

Well to me it seemed reasonable to believe that the new site might be preferred by and outperforming with female visitors rather than the tech-centric guys I was talking to. And in taking a closer look at the design, it seemed as if it lined up with some well-known broad-based gender preferences.

My guess is that guys prefer the old site because of the design cues and because of the buying mode they’re likely to be in when they are not in charge of a family’s finances. The old site:

• seemed dark even when it wasn’t,
• immediately directed your eye to bottom line benefits, and
• made it easy to either “Just Do It” or “Learn More”

All of these things seemed like they would appeal to faster decision makers who had a bit less (emotionally) on the line. The old site promised to “Put your finances on autopilot,” which is definitely a non-budgeted guy thing.

Comparatively, the new site:

• has a decidedly friendlier, lighter, and more open feel to it
• doesn’t harshly direct your eye, but lets you gather the information as you wish
• provides immediate credibility clues through prestigious magazine endorsements underneath the headline.
• explains HOW and WHY mint can accomplish great things for you within the first paragraph – and does so without visually “shouting” at you.
• lets visitors go beyond just “Learn More” to learn about benefits of concern to someone who has to handle a family’s budget or finances: “all your accounts in one place,” “easy budgeting tools,” “Find Instant Savings,” etc. Yes, this requires more brain power or emotional investment to navigate, but it’s clearly more compelling if you’re the one trying to stretch a family budget.
• Replaces “Put your finances on autopilot” with “How mint can help you live a richer life,” which – when you think of richer in it’s more suggestive or emotional connotations – also seems more broadly appealing to females in charge of the family finances.

So my question is, so you guys and gals also find this to be the case? Do your female friends prefer the new mint while your male friends prefer the old? Do you think my analysis is on-target or am I somewhat biased?

Basically, Information Architecture (IA) views websites as libraries in need of the right kind of card catalogue set-up to facilitate information access by visitors.

But most websites aren’t libraries, or merely stores of information. In fact, most commercial websites are more interested in persuading visitors to take certain actions (i.e. converting) than they are in providing access to information.

In this sense, the interactivity enabled by hyperlinks and Websites is more accurately viewed as a digital conversation than a digitized card catalogue. And the goal of the Website’s architect is not to ensure proper categorization of information, but to:

• Anticipate the flow of possible conversations and
• Provide the appropriate hyperlinks to allow visitors to steer the conversation in the direction they want it to go.

So how do you translate, “steering the conversation” into Web architecture? Well, typically, humans steer a conversation by:
Keeping with this analogy to conversations, a website Architect who wanted to design a site for persuasion (rather than “information access”) would be well advised to:

1. Figure out who the website would be conversing with. In other words, figure out who is coming to the site and model them via personas.
2. Map out the conversations while paying particular attention to how different conversational partners would a) self-identify their needs and goals, b) ask questions regarding their concerns, and c) move towards conversion. Allow your personas to walk over the fresh grass, and then study the organic trails they’ve made, rather than forcing all visitors into a grid system of walkways. In other words, create your scenario maps.
3. Create a link-structure and content plan that will allow each visitor to naturally steer the conversation while building up persuasive momentum towards conversion. In other words, convert your non-linear scenario maps into a per-page website blueprint that specifies each page’s messaging and hyperlinks so as to permit visitors to move through the site without requiring them to disengage from the conversation in order to use a navigational bar.

And that, my friends, is the key to creating a website capable of engaging in more intelligent, respectful, and successful sales conversations (i.e. generating higher conversion rates).

So where does that leave traditional Information Architecture?

Well…One still needs a sitemap. You still want those methodical types and returning visitors to be able to skip the conversation and just look up the content they want, which requires you to establish some type of organizational schema and persistent navigation. Traditional IA is great at this because it’s basically digitized library science to begin with.

But never confuse helping users to “find and manage information,” with engaging visitors in meaningful sales conversations. For that you’ll need Persuasion Architecture (PA) –not Information Architecture (IA).

It won’t be easy. Being good at something never is.

A few weeks ago I gave a keynote at the Shop.org online merchandising workshop and had an opportunity to chat with several online retailers of all sizes. Each shared the challenges it faces as it tries to adopt a culture of optimization.

Last week, I shared with you what I learned from Raul Vazquez, CEO of Walmart.com from his keynote at the conference. Unlike many retailers, Walmart.com has a culture of optimization and embraces a process for continuous improvement. Even with its process in place, however, it doesn’t do any A/B or multivariate testing.

An executive from another multibillion dollar online retailer told me an all-too common tale of how it began testing with the help of a vendor. After seeing no lift and investing all the resources, the retailer cut the vendor loose and let testing fall by the wayside. Like so many others in these tight times, it axed testing as a budget item. Can anyone afford to stop optimizing?

The fact that optimization and testing challenges are rampant shouldn’t surprise anyone. In its “Guide to Retail and Web Site Design,” Internet Retailer’s research unwrapped the fact that over 76 percent of online retailers don’t test.

It’s not that online markets have a violent opposition to testing. It’s a combination of things. Many don’t know where to start; others may have started and had limited or no success. Here are some other common challenges that online retailers and online marketers face:

• Simple slice-and-replace testing/optimization. This is the process of Web teams slicing and replacing an element, a page, or a portion of the visitor experience and finding little or no lift in the numbers. So they move on and try another. This is a challenge because this method has no way of determining if the original hypothesis was incorrect (the reason they made the change) or if it was an execution issues.
• Resources. Testing well is hard work and uses resources: time, effort, and cash. And because teams are unsure, they resist or don’t give their best effort.
• Platforms. Some site platforms make it difficult to test. Ultimately, you must determine what costs the company less: lost opportunities, platform upgrades, or changes to allow for easier and more efficient testing.
• Lack of a process. Most retailers test randomly, just selecting something in the conversion funnel or their least favorite page. Others perform large-scale tests and may break or fix many things along the way. In both cases, they have no method for gleaning insight so they can successfully repeat the process.
• Persuasion or brand perception issues. Often time the issues that keep visitors from converting aren’t as simple as a button color, an element’s position, or a form improvement. We recently worked with a big-name financial institution that wasn’t committed to taking the time to test these subtle issues. Instead, they went with another vendor that tested more simplistic conversion issues. Needless to say those efforts didn’t move the needle.

Most of these challenges are related to companies not setting a solid (i.e., more scientific) testing process in place. None of these challenges is a reason to give in.

If you have testing challenges, you should know two things before you throw your hands up. First, you aren’t alone. Second, don’t stop testing — instead stop testing badly by adopting a cycle of optimization and a smart process for doing so.

I will be launching (and signing) my new book, “Always Be Testing,” at Search Engine Strategies San Jose on August 18. The book is based on my 10-plus years of experience helping companies that struggle with testing and giving them practical guidance and tools to deal with these challenges. If you plan on attending, let me know. I’d love to meet up with you and talk about your challenges.

*Cross-posted on ClickZ. 

No doubt, these are exciting times if you love Web tools. For the many folks who are dizzy trying to sort out conversion optimization tool choices, it might be a little frustrating.

In “The Interactive Marketer 2.0,” I made the case for improved optimization in interactive marketing and to think outside the campaign. I listed several steps to get started, including the first step: Get good at free tools, then pay for them. Tools aren’t the indicator of success, but having a process and the people in place to take action are.

The good news in this barrage of 2.0 goodies is that many believe we’ve finally reached tool parity in the Web analytics space. JupiterResearch states the following:

“Despite some small skirmishes over capabilities like video and audio measurement, the Web analytics feature race is largely over,” explained John Lovett, Senior Analyst and lead author of the report for JupiterResearch. “Leading vendors will forge ahead by making data accessible and actionable while expanding offerings into adjacent marketing technologies.”

I agree.

Several people have accused me and my firm of having a Google bias. (Full disclosure: FutureNow is an authorized Google Optimizer consultant.) This simply isn’t true. A sizable percentage of our clients use other tools like Omniture, WebTrends, and Coremetrics. Our policy has always been to work with the analytics/tool vendors of the client’s choice. For many who are just getting started or are experiencing a marketing budget squeeze, the free and robust Google offerings simply make sense. Others have found a need for features available in other tools, and we’re happy to help them use those tools better.

A tool is just that, a tool.

A tool doesn’t persuade your visitors to take action, nor is it exclusively responsible for a company’s success in optimization. So when a client approaches me requesting a tool suggestion I always answer the same. If you have a tool in place now, use it better. If you don’t, start with something free and get good at using it.

A free tool may be all you need. While certain analytics vendors offer what are considered enterprise-level tools, the free and lower priced solutions are typically labeled for use by small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Still, you’d be surprised at the number of large clients who are satisfied with free or cheaper tools. And, we also have several SMB clients that have more sophisticated needs.

Bottom line: don’t get hung up selecting a tool. Any business, no matter the size, that isn’t optimizing today can extract great value from any tool on the market today. The important thing is to get started optimizing and measuring more effectively. There are no more excuses, not even a lower optimizing budget.

Which brings me to my next point. How does one use a tool effectively? You must operationalize it. Your process must lead your team to take an action, e.g., make a change that you can measure. Lastly, you must be able to gain insight about customer behavior from the data. And, you must do this over and over again. Without those three things in place, no tool will usher in the success you seek.

You must always do the work of optimization. A better treadmill won’t, all by itself, trim your love handles. Likewise, a cheap camera in the hands of a skilled photographer will always take better pictures than one used by a clumsy newbie.

A tool is a tool is a tool. Pick one, learn how to use it effectively, and you’ll see optimization success. Then we can talk about what other tools you might need.

Then we can all afford drool worthy gas grills in our backyards.

*Cross-posted on ClickZ.

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Editor’s Note: If you’re buried in data and looking for a better process to keep your campaigns customer-focused, accountable and metrics-driven, contact us today for a confidential and free consultation.

That’s a very large price to pay for having everything at our fingertips, all the time, in any format.

Our decision-making processes can’t always keep up with our choices. The same challenge applies to website design and content. The Web is a fantastic place to shop, research, and be entertained, but sometimes when I’m online, I notice physical fatigue when I’m trying to figure out where to go next!

When I’m evaluating a vendor’s Services page, should I:

• Sign up for their newsletter?
• Read about the awards they’ve won?
• Look at a list of clients?
• Read the CEO’s blog?

When I’m shopping for a health supplement, should I:

• Read about related products?
• Read about their latest “green” program?
• View my empty shopping cart?
• Become an affiliate?

Even though we come to a website with the best intentions, we’re by nature drawn to the shiny distractions that marketers and designers put along our path. We go down rabbit holes in websites and sometimes by the time we find our way back to the trail, we’ve lost our momentum . . . or maybe we’ve been interrupted and have to go back to work

So I’m wondering: How much money is lost each year because we overload our potential customers with information on our web pages? How many visitors are driven away by cluttered designs, too many messages, too many offers, and too many choices?

Here’s the problem: Marketers naturally want to use messaging, offers, promotions and more to persuade web visitors. But in their efforts, they often contribute to information overload, which is proven to hamper the decision-making process. Also, companies tend to add more content to their websites over time and rarely retire content that’s outdated or irrelevant.

The solution: Most web pages should have only one primary goal. If there are alternate options, offers, or next steps, that’s fine. But don’t interrupt the task at hand, and don’t overload your visitors with distractions.

The one exception I can think of is the homepage, which should, at a minimum, a) communicate Unique Value Proposition, and b) route visitors.

Should you remove these secondary goals and choices? Maybe, but sometimes making them less prominent is enough to move the needle. It comes down to a business decision whether your “Sizzlin’ Hot Summer Giveaway” promotion is worth distracting a certain percentage of visitors from their primary goal.

What if you don’t know the goal of all of your site’s pages? You could start with rediscovering who your customers really are, or some analysis of your website’s “data dump,” or you could hypothesize and run some tests. Sometimes the purpose of a page is simply to present options. That’s fine, but don’t distract visitors from understanding their options and making a decision.

So let’s get practical here:

• Category page primary goal = route visitors to sub-category or product page
• Product page primary goal = persuade visitors to purchase
• In the News page primary goal = build brand credibility
• Shopping cart page primary goal = get the cash!
• General content page primary goal = build persuasive momentum

Although it seems hard at first, it’s actually pretty easy to find a single, primary goal for most pages on your site. Then you have the harder task of deciding how to do away with unnecessary distractions, get rid of design clutter, and allow visitors freedom without information overload.

Sometimes having a new pair of eyes look at your site can really speed this process up.

If you’re overloading customers with info, you’re not alone. Many world-class, million-dollar sites are guilty of information overload, and even the best online marketers need to work on it constantly.

Best of luck. To avoid information overload, let’s focus on answering the three essential questions of Persuasion Architecture:

• Who are your visitors?
• What action do you want them to take?
• What will persuade them to take that action?

. . .

About the Author: Brendan Regan is a Persuasion Analyst at FutureNow, Inc. This is his first GrokDotCom post. Welcome to the blog, Brendan!

Call me mean, but I like that thought.

I’ve long held a theory that women are more sensitive to shipping costs than men. I have no proof of this theory. It’s mostly anecdotal. When I talk to women about shopping online, shipping costs invariably come up as a sore topic, which is why I took notice of this discussion on the High Rankings message board about how women shop online.

Randy Cullom brought up some insight he had about shipping charges, and something he noticed with women in particular:

I’ve had two of these market research session since I first noticed the anomaly, and in each of them 80% or more of the women in the group expressed a strong or very strong dissatisfaction if the shipping and/or handling was out of whack from what they considered to be normal. As an aside, I asked those dissatisfied to write down what S&H they considered reasonable, and in all cases they were pretty much spot on with the real costs, with a little bit extra. Men seemed much more inclined to let “too costly” shipping and handling charges slide right on by. This still too small of a test group (only 60 women total between the two sessions) to be statistically sound, but the reaction has been so strong that I’m inclined to think it’s valid.

Interesting. Still not absolute proof, but it’s enough to make me ask, “How are your shipping costs helping or hurting your conversion, especially when selling to women?”

Consider setting up an exit survey when someone leaves your site to ask if shipping cost was a reason for them leaving without purchasing. If your shipping costs might be considered “high” by female consumers, what can you do about? Why not take a cue from Amazon and see if there’s an easy way for her to increase her purchase to the point that “free shipping” might make sense?

Another option: Create an incentive to purchase more products so that the shipping cost doesn’t feel as high.

For example, if you’re buying one pound of gourmet coffee for, say, $10 and the shipping is $8, there’s a good chance shipping is going to be a deal breaker. What if you tried a promotion where customers who buy 3 pounds get the fourth pound for half off. Encourage her to buy “a month’s worth of coffee.” You’re giving her a reduced price, which she’ll like. Shipping costs may go up a little to cover the extra coffee, but chances are it’s no longer 80% of the purchase price.

Obviously, you have to do what makes good business sense. These are just some suggestions. But if you’re selling to women, take a close look at your shipping charges and see if there are ways to lessen the sting for these shipping-sensitive women.

For more ideas on testing shipping costs, check out “How to Increase Shopping Cart Abandonment.”

Have you ever abandoned an online sale because you perceived the shipping costs to be too high? (I’d love to read comments from the guys as well.)

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About the Author: Holly Buchanan is a Persuasion Architect at FutureNow and co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth: Today’s Female Customer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys.