I am disappointed to report that our online shopping experience at Target.com was, for the most part, a very frustrating experience. We already had in mind some of the things that we would like to purchase for our new apartment, but even being able to find these items from the home page proved to be a difficult task.  Essentially, we were late stage buyers ready to hand over our free dollars to Target provided that they could meet the product requirements that we were looking for.

For example, we knew we would like a bookshelf.  However, after going to the ‘Furniture’ tab at the top of the screen we didn’t find any options specifically for bookshelves. So, after scanning the page, we selected the ‘Storage and Organization’ option from the left navigation hoping to get some results.  What we found was an array of options totally unrelated to what we were looking for.

So…we tried again.  We went back to ‘Furniture’ and decided to search under ‘Home Office.’  Maybe this would give us what we were looking for. Finally, under a heading titled ‘Home Office Essentials’ on the left navigation we were able to find ‘Bookcases’ in small print.  After going to this link, we were given some more options to narrow down our search.  At this point, we had a pretty good idea of what sort of bookshelf we wanted according to size and probable color, so we went for the ‘Shop By Color’ option.

Another difficulty we experienced was navigating through the product pages.  There were limited pictures for each product, making our decision a difficult one.  At this point, it was only because of our abundance of gift cards that we trudged on through this process, as finding and selecting our particular product in mind felt more like a battle then being guided toward what we had in mind.

Possibly the most frustrating part of this online shopping experience was our experience during checkout. Target only allows four gift cards to be used at checkout.  If not all of the cost is covered by the gift cards, they obviously require an additional form of payment.  The most concerning aspect in this process for us was that at no time during the checkout process were we told what was covered by our gift cards and what was being charged to our card. This lead us to complete check out and void the same transaction three times before we felt satisfied that Target was not charging our credit card the full amount of the purchase!  Their web analysts must be confused by that data!

This is just another example of a website failing to speak adequately to the late stage buyer ready to buy.  Rather than being able to easily navigate through the site in order to find a product we already had in mind, we had to actually dig for the product.  Target also failed to give us confidence in the product we were buying with more product images to ensure us of the actual quality of the product, not to mention our troubling experience during the checkout process.  If our Target bookshelf wasn’t essentially free for us newlyweds, we would have been tempted to avoid online shopping with Target altogether in exchange for a less time-consuming and more enjoyable experience with another company.

Now, the point of all this isn’t to beat up on Target or their Web Team; their struggle is our struggle: how to provide intuitive navigation and browsing pathways through a large catalog site and make converting easy and fun!

Editor’s Note: Whitney isn’t new to the FutureNow team, but she’s new to the blog with her inaugural (inblogural?) post.  Welcome, Whitney!

This is the homepage of rent.com. They are asking Brittany to enter her email address in order to see the listings. Brittany doesn’t want to signup for another junk mail source, as she’s already frustrated with the amount of junk mail she gets on a daily basis. She decided to enter her email address that she never uses in order to at least be able to browse the listings.

When she gets to the listings page, she chooses to get “More Info” on one of the properties and sees a pop up that makes her now enter a password for her account. She definitely didn’t want to create an account! She just wants to see the property, see if it meets her needs. Only at the point that she thinks you have a property that meets her needs, will she be ok to “create an account”- and even then, “creating an account” isn’t the language that would resonate with what she’s looking to accomplish. She was frustrated and felt that Rent.com was being sneaky and didn’t have her needs in mind throughout this process. She left.

In this previous post; 5 simple tips for lead-generation sites, one of the tips is to “Avoid Asking For The Lead Too Early”! I have worked with hundreds of clients in a large variety of industries over the last 5 years at FutureNow. Anytime a client asked for too much personal information on their website too quickly, and made the visitor click too many times in order to get the information they came searching for, we helped them increase their conversion rate by simply changing this portion of their website to be more customer focused.

Remember, it’s not about you or your sales process. Your visitors are volunteers in the process and are coming to your site with motivations and intent. In my girlfriend’s case, it was Rent.com’s lead to lose and they lost her. By the way, she rented an apartment through another website that didn’t ask her for any personal information until she had found the property that interested her.

Are you possibly losing leads for this reason? If you are guilty of asking for the lead too early, try testing a new approach to your signup process. Remember, sometimes it’s not about the number of email addresses you get, but it’s instead more important to focus on the “quality” of the leads that you get.

If you’re familiar with FutureNow’s process or are a frequent grok reader, you’ll already know that our process involves not only designing effective marketing efforts for each stage of the buying process, but also involves identifying what the conversion points are for each stage of the buying process. However, for those who are not familiar, let’s review:

Early stage visitors are qualified as someone who has only begun their shopping process and may not know exactly what they want, nor are they convinced that they want to purchase from you. At this stage it’s important to answer visitors’ questions and not push them towards anything that says “Buy Now!” Offering these visitors comparison among your own products is also helpful so they can narrow down what they’re shopping for.  An example of a search term an early stage visitor may use is: “car insurance.”

Middle stage visitors are qualified as someone who has decided upon the product they’re searching for, but are not convinced yet that you can provide them with what they need. They may be shopping to find the best price or the best company to fill their needs. An example of a search term a middle stage visitor may use is: “comprehensive and collision auto insurance.”

Late stage visitors are qualified as someone who have decided upon the product they’re searching for and know who they want to purchase this product from. These visitors are yours to lose. Even though they’ve already decided upon purchasing from you, there are still barriers that may make these visitors lose confidence, such as a confusing checkout process, expired product assurances, and slow loading speeds. An example of a search term a late stage visitor may use is: “Progressive comprehensive and collision auto insurance”

Okay, now that we’re all on the same page, let’s get into the meat of this subject. At each of these stages, you have the opportunity to convert these visitors to move to the next stage of their buying process. This doesn’t mean that they necessarily became a sale or a lead. This simply means that you’ve identified the point of interaction at which a visitor has demonstrated to you that they have been persuaded to go from the early stage in their buying process to the middle stage. This micro-conversion point may be the action of “landing on a page” or “signing up for a newsletter.” Identifying micro-conversion points for each of these stages of the buying process is key because they tell us the paths we’re trying to guide visitors through. The two most important parts of graduating prospects from one stage of the buying process to the next are:

1. Getting qualified traffic

2. Getting visitors to complete the lead generation or customer information form

So, how do you improve these two key parts? Let’s start with getting qualified traffic. This may require an over-haul of your keywords. First, write down every one of your marking efforts (PPC, radio ads, print ads etc.) Now it’s time to start digging. Eliminate any efforts that cost you more than you’re making in return. Look at who else you’re competing with for the same traffic and evaluate if/why, they’re getting a larger portion of the market that you are. Are your keywords too specific? Too general? Does your scent trail leave visitors at a dead end? Look through your analytics data, are you using content targeting that is bringing in the wrong type of visitor? If you’re getting 30,000 visitors a month, but none of them are qualified, you might as well be getting zero.

Lead generation forms are my personal nemesis, mostly because I feel I’ve been betrayed by them before. We all have had the experience where, as visitors, we fill out a customer information form, only to begin receiving random emails from a source you’ve never heard of, or asked a legitimate question about the service only to have it go unanswered. To put it simply: lead generation forms have a bad reputation. However, they’re a major win in terms of a micro-conversion so they need to be optimized to their utmost potential. Here are a few tips I regularly use when optimizing customer information forms:

1. Assurances: Let your visitor know that you wont sell their information to email/phone solicitation lists. For extra points, you can give them the option on how they’d prefer to be contacted.

2.  Let them know how long until they’ll be hearing from you. Having a 24-48 hr window for response is typical. (And, not just some automated response that says “Thanks, we got your inquiry, we’ll be in contact with you soon!”)

3. List your phone number near or within your customer information form. Many people (myself included) have been so put off by the use of lead generation forms that they no longer want to involve themselves with them. Having a note nearby that says “Want to talk to someone now? Call us as 123-456-7890″ this way you won’t lose a visitor simply because they fear the form.

4. Let them know what they’re getting. Is this a form for more information? To answer questions? Or, by filling out this form have they begun the purchasing process? Have a title to your customer information form that tell the visitor why they should fill it out, and what they’ll achieve by doing so.

Still want more information? Check out these great posts from Kevin Lee, and Dave Young.

If you’re going to beat your competition and get the business this holiday season,  you’ll need to be creative with your promotions and make sure that they appeal to your potential customers. It’s obvious if you try to cut corners, this turns your visitors off. Go out on a limb, take a look at the specials your competitors are offering, and then offer your visitors something even more appealing.

DSW sends me emails and direct mail with coupon codes for exclusive, limited time offers. They have sent me “holiday versions” of these marketing communication pieces continuously over the last couple of weeks. Their site offers more limited time offers for free shipping and $20 off an online purchase of $99 or more. DSW successfully persuades first time visitors to take advantage of great offers and they also do a wonderful job at reaching out to existing customers with exclusive offers we simply can’t resist!

Apply some of these tactics to your own marketing communications mix. Feature free shipping and exclusive, limited time offer coupon codes on your site. Send emails and/or direct mail pieces to your existing customer base, and offer them a great deal. Where you don’t have room to offer your customers a lower price than your competitors, be creative with how you can differentiate yourself using “specials.” Free shipping on orders that meet a minimum dollar amount work great. You could also offer a $25 gift certificate for every $100 dollars spent. If you’re really strapped and can only offer deals where it’s going to have the biggest impact, you could offer the great deals to those who have demonstrated intent to buy but are unlikely to buy unless you offer them a deal.

What other types of promotions would appeal to potential customers when doing their holiday shopping? If you come across any sites that offer different promotions than the ones I’ve listed here, please share them.

Staying in a mediocre hotel in Albany, NY (with mediocre WiFi) got me thinking about another optimization tactic that we forgot to post about this year: SITE PERFORMANCE.

[Note: I was curious about how the big industry players were doing in terms of performance, so I started hitting them from my lousy WiFi connection.  The un-scientific results are sprinkled throughout this post, and they aren't all that surprising ]

So, if the goal is to for your site to be flooded with qualified, motivated buyers all through the Holiday Season, has your site been optimized for that flood of traffic? Performance testing is a good start, but that can only tell you how fast code loads, http response times, etc.

The more important thing is what the customer experience is like when your B2C site is under heavy traffic loads:

• What order do elements load in?  Is the user stuck staring at your logo while they wait for product images or navigation?
• Are your calls to action bulletproof?  If the button images are slow to load, do you have text behind them that loads first and is still prominent and high-contrast?
• Does your global navigation ALWAYS load quickly?  How about search?
• Have you been “naughty” or “nice” in regards to having good alt test behind images and links?
• Do javascript menus have alternate HTML versions?
• Was your site’s code architected to provide the best user experience under the worst server load conditions?

The software development profession uses the phrase “degrade gracefully” to describe a site or application that still works with javascript turned off, images turned off, on dial-up connections, on Internet Explorer 4, etc.

I like to think the same concept should be applied to sites that are under heavy traffic stress. If every GrokDotCom.com reader decided to hit your site within the same 10-minute period, would your site ‘degrade gracefully,’ or would it be completely un-usable?  Go try shopping on your site on a dial-up connection.  Of course, it’s going to be frustrating, but do the important things load first?  Can you at least navigate/browse/search while you’re waiting for pages to fully load?

Site performance optimization is definitely not FutureNow’s area of expertise, but these screenshots are a good reminder that all the fancy conversion rate optimization in the world won’t help if your site takes too long to load, or won’t load at all (ahem…Bing.com shopping site!).  Remember that “Functional” is the base of the Hierarchy of Optimization!

As I begin to go through and click unsubscribe at the bottom of each email, I was shocked at where I was taken. Pages where it appears I may have actually been signing up for more emails then I was unsubscribing from! It was a nightmare.

Then, I came to Amazon.com.  I know we’ve used Amazon often as an example of how to do online optimization well, but they just do such a great job I can’t help but share.  Here’s what they did to not only make it easy to unsubscribe, but actually made me consider NOT unsubscribing:

1. They remembered me!  Nearly all other sites had me enter my own email address.  Hello, I got to this page by following a link at the bottom of an email you already sent me, shouldn’t you know who I am?!?

2. Their button was labeled “Confirm Changes.” I know this may seem simple, but when you’re given the option of either “Submit” or “Cancel,” and you’re trying to cancel a subscription to a promotional email, clicking on the button labeled “Cancel” is tempting.

3. They sent me a follow up email on the changes I’d made. I know some people may be frustrated by receiving another email after you just asked not to be emailed anymore, but for me, it was nice to know that my request was received.  I think we’ve all been in a situation where we seem to unsubscribe from the same email over and over again, and yet continue to receive it.

While we hope that those you email won’t choose to unsubscribe, giving them an easy way to do it (that puts the customer first) may help them reconsider.

1. Look Nice – You want to put your best face forward. Your homepage is often the first thing that your visitor sees when they visit your site, so make sure that it is aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eye. Remember, for a vast majority of sites, the homepage has the highest bounce rate.  Give your a visitor a reason not to leave.

2. Make your prospect interested in what you have to offer – In the dating scene, this means opening up and making sure they know something about you that makes them want to learn more.  In website optimization, it means having a top notch Unique Value Proposition (UVP).

3. Remember them – Saving a visitor’s shopping cart for at least 30 days is a helpful tool for reminding visitors that they’re wanted (especially as Holiday shopping ramps up).

4. Don’t give them a reason to leave – The easier it is for your visitor to navigate your site, and the more quickly you can get them through their buying process, the more likely they are to convert.

5. Don’t talk up your best friend – The worst thing you can do is link to a site outside your own and push your visitor in that direction. Tools and references are always helpful, but don’t make them more attractive than the options that push them further though the conversion funnel. If you feel it’s necessary to link to outside domains, use a visual cue (like the common “tear off” icon) to indicate to the visitor that they’ll be leaving your site.

Now go ask for another date, or better yet, get down on one knee

1. It’s often where “low-hanging fruit” grows. Conversion obstacles can often be removed quickly, leading to large gains in a short period of time.
2. It’s an area where you’ve already succeeded in persuading the prospect. They are in the Late Stage of their buying process, so a relatively low investment can give you a relatively high return.  In other words, you don’t have to produce pages and pages of persuasive content to move the visitor forward in her buying process.
3. Customer expectations regarding their online shopping experiences are rising every day. If your competitor has a more optimized checkout, they may be taking market share from you.

There’s a very wide spectrum of online selling solutions, from a PayPal button on a single sales page to a highly-customized checkout with a floating/sliding/shining interface and behaviorally-targeted cross-selling.  Still, FutureNow’s clients tend to fall into 1 of 2 camps:  those with a 3rd-party cart and those with a custom-built cart.

There are pros and cons to each, which I’ll touch on briefly, but please don’t consider this brief post the authoritative work on the subject–there’s lots of research and reviews out there on the various shopping cart investment options.

3rd Party Shopping Carts, also known as “canned”: Some of the pros are lower cost, quicker time to market, and the efficiencies/convenience gained when you buy a package that handles payment gateway, fraud protection, SSL encryption, etc.  Some of the cons are lack of control over look and feel, lack of control over the user experience, and more difficulties encountered with testing and optimization.  The tradeoffs seem pretty straightforward, but a lot depends on the IT resources you have at your disposal.

Custom Shopping Carts: Some of the pros are a user experience that’s more tightly integrated with the rest of your site, better tracking for better analytics, easier to make changes and add features, and easier integration with testing tools like Google Website Optimizer.  The obvious cons are higher cost, more operational overhead, and slower time to market.  Again, the tradeoffs are the same, and a lot depends on your company’s resources, budget, and business goals.

Those prospects we speak with who are interested in optimizing for a higher return on their eCommerce investments often ask questions like: Can I optimize my 3rd party shopping cart? The answer is a definitive “Yes!” even on the most restrictive 3rd party carts. One of our clients enjoyed a 38% increase month-over-month in their “funnel conversion rate” just by adding some reassuring copy and links only in the areas of their cart they had access to: the header and the footer!

That’s an extreme example, but with our guidance, clients can make the best of their current platform, whatever it happens to be.  And many clients, after getting a few “wins,” decide they want to upgrade from a 3rd party cart to a partially or fully custom cart.  In that situation, we often work to optimize their checkout before it goes live, saving them time and money, and then continue to refine the customer experience and persuasiveness of the live cart through more formal testing. We also work with several implementation partners who grok Persuasion Architecture and can build custom carts based on OnTarget recommendations.

The point of all of this is that you shouldn’t defer or avoid Optimization based on what type of checkout platform you have.  Persuasion Architecture is “platform-agnostic,” and the best time for Optimization is always “Now.”

I’ll touch on one that seems to work across the board to help boost conversion: the “click to compare.”

Have you ever come to a category page with an incredibly long list of products, and had a hard time narrowing down your options and choosing one product?  Give the visitor the option to check a box next to each product on a category page, and then have her click on a button to compare these chosen products. This not only lets the visitor take note of which products interest her from the long scrolling list, but it also gives her the ability to compare more detailed features that don’t fit in the limited space of a category page.

One of our clients, a seller of home medical supplies, gives their visitors the option to check boxes next to each product they want to compare, and then click a large call to action to “compare checked items.”

This action results in a pop up where visitors are able to compare these chosen product options on a single page in more detail.

If you don’t already offer the visitor the option to compare, help her narrow down her choices and test a version of your site where you allow her to compare her product options.

Happy Testing

What I love most about this list is the way it segregates into sub-components or elaborations on Future Now’s  three questions that are the basis of Persuasion Architecture:

1) Who is coming to the site?

2) What is it they are trying to accomplish?

3) What action do we want them to take, and how do we ensure this matches up with what they are trying to accomplish?  In other words, what do they need to know/feel/believe in order to confidently take that action?

Separating out Seth’s List

Here’s how I see Seth’s list falling into those categories:

1) Who is coming to the site?

• Who are we trying to please? If it’s the boss, what does she want? Is impressing a certain kind of person important? Which kind?
• Who are we trying to reach? Is it everyone? Our customers? A certain kind of prospect?
• What are the sites that this group has demonstrated they enjoy interacting with?
• Do people find the site via word of mouth? Are they looking to answer a specific question?
• Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?

2) What is it they are trying to accomplish?

• “If it’s the boss [that we are trying to please], what does she want?”
• “Are they looking to answer a specific question?
• Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost? Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?

3) What action do we want them to take…what do they need to know/feel/believe in order to confidently take that action?

• What is the goal of the site?
• In other words, when it’s working great, what specific outcomes will occur?
• Are we trying to close sales?
• Are we telling a story?
• Are we earning permission to follow up?
• Are we hoping that people will watch or learn?
• Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?
• Are we building a tribe of people who will use the site to connect with each other?
• Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
• Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is this our one sign post?
• Is that information high in bandwidth or just little bits of data?
• Do we want people to call us?
• How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?

Operational [and larger] Questions

Yet, while Seth’s persuasive questions are covered within these three categories, there’s a pile of operational questions left over:

• How many people on your team have to be involved? At what level?
• Who needs to update this site? How often?
• How often can we afford to overhaul this site?
• How much money do we have to spend? How much time?

In other words, what will this cost us? A question that opens the door for much larger debate of, do we really need to incur this cost in the first place?  What makes us think we need a redesign?

And that gets us to the question that our own Jeffrey Eisenberg tackled within his free report 7 Big Questions of Highly Effective Online Marketing. For starters he suggests that people interested in redoing their site should ask the big questions first:

• Do we need a redesign, or can we work with what we have?
• Exactly how would a redesigned site better serve our visitors?
• If the best-converting sites are often boring in their design, are we willing to design our site with that in mind?  [in other words, do we have the intellectual integrity to separate out an notional "want" for a prettier/slicker website from a real business need]
• Will we incorporate a scientific testing methodology into our redesign so we can optimize user interactions based on predictions of how our different audience segments will engage with the site? [in other words, are we really serious about redesigning to improve performance?  Serious enough to bake accountability into the very fabric of the redesigned site?]

And if you’re not sure if you need a redesign, perhaps it’s best to take a cold hard look at your current Website in order to:

• Isolate what isn’t working and what is
• Determine whether you need to re-conceive your site because too many elements bog down the original design

On Target as a Precursor and Follow-up to a Website Redo

While Future Now has been involved in hundreds of successful Website redesigns and renovations, Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg clearly saw that there were far more sites out there in need of optimization and improvement than full scale redesigns.

And far more Website owners who couldn’t answer the majority of the questions posed in Seth’s post and Jeffrey’s report.

That’s how OnTarget was born.

OnTarget allows Website owners to gain insight into what is and isn’t working with their current site, and provides them with prioritized recommendations to optimize the site, fix the leaks, etc. Think of it as an incremental redesign based on measurable results.

With OnTarget it is only when major persuasive and usability obstacles can’t be surmounted without major retooling, re-skinning, etc. that a site redesign is contemplated.  And in those cases, the business owners are able to answer those critical questions posed by Seth and Jeffrey.

This often means walking away from big redesign projects.  But it always means providing the client with the wisest and best use of his online resources.

[Editors Note:  The author of this article is now blogging at jeffsextonwrites.com]

How are you wasting your visitors time?

• Does it take a while for your pages to load?
• Do your database lookups take so long your visitors can go and get a snack before the results are returned?
• Do you have important content that is hidden away?
• Does it take your visitors too long to find the product they are looking for?
• Do you force visitors to pogo-stick between a category page and product pages because your category page fails to provide enough information to confidently select among the choices.
• Is it difficult to sort among choices by the factors or qualities that your visitor feels important?  Or do you  only allow sorting by price?
• Does your registration or check out process have too many steps and take to long to complete?
• Does it take several steps for your visitor to figure out their total cost including shipping?

Here is another classic way of wasting your visitors time that could easily be avoided.

Do a search on Diapers.com for “exersaucers“. You’ll notice 4 listings. 3 of them are out of stock.  But the initial search listings don’t tell you that.  The visitor has to click through to each product page, only to find out she can’t buy the item – a triple loss, as the site has simultaneously wasted the visitor’s time, frustrated the visitor, and come off as an unreliable/unprofessional business.

Placing your out of stock messaging on the category pages will prevent your visitors from repeatedly finding that the product they clicked on and started to desire is – upon their arrival on the product page – suddenly unavailable for purchase.

So while I’ve given you a valuable list and a good examples to get you started, every site has its own unique challenges, and it’s worth asking your team: how many different ways can you find to shave valuable seconds during your visitors journey to become a lead or sale?  How can you help your vistors beat their own internal clocks in order to win more business?

We pull into the most ordinary of Shell gas stations (international readers: you might better recognize this company as Royal Dutch Shell) and are greeted by a very happy personality, Billy, who pumps the gas at this full service station. He has an entire conversation with my mother — not just about the expected “what grade of fuel”  but about regular life issues such as weather, health, etc. Like two old friends who bump into each other in a cafe. Then he finally goes and pumps the gas. Then I watch Billy move on to the next car where he proceeds to have another friendly conversation with another customer who he clearly is well acquainted with. And on Billy moves to yet a third customer, just as our fuel gauge reaches Full. Billy’s station is always busy, it seems.

“Mom, how long have you been coming here?”

“Oh, since I got my first Subaru, in 2001.”

“Nine years you’ve been going to the same place. There’s plenty of other gas stations all over the place. And you don’t go anywhere else?”

“Why would I? He’s a polite young man and he always smiles. And it’s full service for only a penny more than the self-service stations. Plus, now I recognize the other customers, too.”

Can you imagine that? A sort of social-networking-meets-customer-retention at a gas station? As you might guess, this Happy Billy no doubt means a very happy Shell station owner, selling what is otherwise a most fungible of commodities wherein people will often drive miles to save a penny per gallon. Instead at this Shell station on Post Road in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, people go out of their way to pay more (in a recession) for one of Billy’s smiles.

Now, I’ll be honest. This wouldn’t work in New York City, where I live. People are in just too much of a rush. But in the correct environment where life is slower and individual customers are seen as individual people this is incredibly effective. I can only hope Billy gets a bonus based on revenues.

I wonder, how many online businesses are willing to think of their customers as fellow citizens of the same small town and to know them with the online equivalent of a Billy smile? When’s the last time you felt that sort of allegiance to your cable company, or the convenience store where you buy milk? And think of the long-term revenue it means for a company that achieves that sort of loyalty.

Does your sales and customer service staff treat your customers to a Billy Smile?

As I relate the following three eCommerce mishaps, be thinking about whether you can eradicate all of them from your business by the time the “Holiday Rush” hits. ALL are preventable, if you start today and take one item at a time.

Let’s start at the “precipitating event;” the spark that lit my desire to shop online…

1. An email with a promo code arrived.  w00t!  They paid attention to past purchases, and sent me a great promotion: 10% off a brand I’ve purchased before, and free shipping if the order exceeds a certain amount.

How They’re Losing Sales: Despite not mentioning an expiration date for the promo code, it was expired by the time I reached checkout.  I’m notoriously slow for opening emails from online retailers, but I bet I’m not alone.  Creating a sense of urgency with an expiration date is fine, but remember that shoppers sometimes go weeks without going through their personal email accounts to read your promo codes.

And now it’s Customer Service’s turn…

2. When the promo code came up as expired, I was understandably disappointed.  I’d just spent a fair amount of my weekend building up enough value in my shopping cart to qualify for the free shipping (Yes, I’m cheap.)  My credit card was out of my wallet.  So, I clicked the live chat in the cart to see if they’d extend the promo code, or give me an equivalent one.

How They’re Losing Sales: The live chat agent, while polite and earnest, was not able to do anything to help me (be a cheapskate).  They weren’t empowered by their employer to get creative and save me from abandoning my cart.  They suggested I call the “real” Customer Service during regular M-F business hours.  So my guess is that the live chat is being outsourced, which is fine, but if they aren’t empowered to save sales, they’re probably not giving good ROI.

Now stepping up to the plate, Technology…

3. I came back the next day with the intention of calling the retailer and trying to get them to extend the promo code or give me the equivalent deal.  So, I returned to the site and clicked “My Cart” to review what I’d put in there, and have it on-screen when I called.

How They’re Losing Sales: They didn’t save my cart! So many sites are saving cart items via cookie that I assumed my items would be there the following day or week.  So now I’m definitely not going to re-build my cart AND call them to try and negotiate the promo code.  I’m going to just repress the whole memory…maybe I’ll even forget the retailer’s brand in the process!

These 3 blunders may seem unconnected from a business perspective, but from a buyer perspective, they were all part of a persuasion scenario that broke down and turned a VERY motivated shopper into a lost sale.

I do like the site, and hope they can address these issues and stay in business.  But they and others will have a very painful holiday sales season if they don’t treat the disparate parts as a unified buying experience that must be nearly flawless to be profitable.

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

Contrary to common opinion, David Ogilvy didn’t have a preference for long copy.

What he had was an overwhelming bias towards anything that had been proven to work (which included long copy).  Ogilvy’s real, professed preferences were for consumer testing, research-driven techniques, and performance-based advertising in the truest sense of the term.

Based on those things, the conclusion he came to was that messaging and relevance had to have highest priority. Everything else – creativity, design, layout – should be subordinated to the end goal of conveying a salient message in as persuasive a manner as possible. In print, this took the form of what has come to be known as “The Ogilvy Layout.”

Understanding Ogilvy’s Layout and Why it Still Works

There are three main parts to the Ogilvy Layout, with a corresponding and crucial quality for each element:

1. The picture, which should have “story appeal”
2. The headline, which should tie into the “story appeal” of the picture
3. And the body copy, which most be placed in the right relationship to both the picture and the headline as to anticipate the reader’s visual preferences and enhance readability.

I’ve dealt with Story Appeal in previous posts, but let’s talk about headlines before diving into why Ogilvy’s favorite arrangement continues to stand the test of time.

What I’ve Noticed About Ogilvy’s Headlines

In his book, Ogilvy on Advertising, David Ogilvy writes about the importance of captions no less than 4 times, urging the reader to include captions underneath all of their photographs each and ever time.  According to the research Ogilvy cites, 4 times as many readers read captions as body copy and 10 times as many people read headlines as body copy.

So while it may seem obvious that the headline and the main picture (or “hero shot” in today’s lingo) should be related, it also seems that you can grab even more reader-grabbing power for your headlines if you make use of some of the compelling “what’s this picture all about” draw of captions.  Here’s a perfect example of this:

Pretty difficult not to read a bit more about that story, isn’t it?

Let’s Talk Layout and Arrangement

Here’s the thing: because of his attention to research, Ogilvy knew what many online copywriters are still learning:

**People scan and skim first and read second

and they only read IF their scan turns up something worthwhile.**

Now, in magazines, which are mostly read as a diversion, the first thing to get scanned are pictures.  We are visual creatures and pictures typically convey a lot of information (and emotion) fast, so a strong visual is almost always going to be the first thing the eye fixes on when the reader is engaging in general browsing for interest.  Please note, though, that this scanning order changes for task oriented individuals interacting with a website.  People scanning a web page redefine “worthwhile” by relevance to their task, and therefore focus on the headlines first.

Getting back to magazine ads, if the picture is intriguing, the next thing a person will scan is the headline and possibly the caption.  After that, and only after that, the person in question will skim (or read) the body copy.

For emphasis, this is THE order in which an audience will scan a magazine ad/page:

1. Picture first,
2. Headline second,
3. Copy last.

To quote Ogilvy himself:

“Readers look first at the illustration, then at the headline, then at the copy. So put these elements in that order – illustration at the top, headline under the illustration, copy under the headline. If you put the headline above the illustration, you are asking people to scan in an order which does not fit their habit.”

And to paraphrase Steve Krug, don’t make the reader think; it’s just as easy to stop reading or engaging with the ad as it is to expend the extra effort navigating an oh-so-creative-but-against-the-grain layout.

Eye Tracking Heat Maps Prove the Power of Ogilvy’s Layout

The brilliant people over at Think Eye Tracking recently put three different car ads to the test: one Ogilvy-inspired 1-page layout compared to 2 new-school double-trucks (aka 2-page spreads). You can see their blog post about  their tests here, but I’ve also posted the Ogilvy-inspired heat map below. Check it out:

Notice how the headline and body copy receive most of the attention.  The picture draws the eye, but the messaging gets the most time and attention from the viewer/reader.

Unfortunately, a direct comparison of heat maps isn’t possible, because Think Eye Tracking only posted the heat map from the Porsche add and not the ones from the Mercedes and BMW ads.  But they DID give percentages of each ad’s ability to create reader retention of various elements within the ad, including the  call to action.  Assuming that the call to action was made within or at the end of the body copy (a fairly safe assumption), we can see how the ads stack up in terms of getting people to read the copy/pay attention to the messaging:

• Ogilvy Layout/Porsche Ad: 59% of readers noted the call to action
• Mercedes Ad: 29%
• BMW Ad: 11%

The Ogilvy Layout doubled readership of the copy while using half the ad space!

Incidentally, the use of a 1-pager instead of a double-spread was also recommended by Ogilvy, as the double-spread cost much more but didn’t increase readership in proportion to its cost.

And for those of you who read this far, or who doubted Ogivly’s performance-based bias, enjoy this short video of Ogilvy addressing the Direct Marketers of his day:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Just for the record, while I DO draw some distinctions between the online world and old-school direct marketing, I also think that online “marketers” who stray too far from direct marketing principles end up producing websites like this:

www.porsche.co.uk/innerstrength

In case you’re wondering, yes, that is the URL used in the Porsche ad’s call to action.  Just the sort of thing you’d remember after flipping through the ad isn’t it?  Not.

Anyway, go ahead and frustrate yourself by interacting with that “piece of work” for awhile.  You’ll undoubtedly find yourself wishing that the same, sane approach to design and layout had been used in creating the website as had been used in designing the ad.

P.S. I’m not advocating a literal use of the Ogilvy layout to a digital format, but rather an intelligent application of Ogilvy’s subordination of design, creativity, and layout to messaging. More about that in a follow up post…

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

Don’t do Search Engine Optimization!

At SMX last week Google’s Matt Cutts, basically explained that “Google does profile SEOs. They’re identified as “high risk” and so are all of their associated projects.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Matt’s comments are a pre-cursor of Google cleaning up their index and rankings. Will this be the next Google Florida type update coming?

Lisa starts her post asking if we can stop talking about nofollow and PageRank sculpting; might that just be one of Google’s SEO profiling techniques?

Google publishes a set of suggested Webmaster guidelines to help Google find, index, and rank your site. No where on there do you see any talk of “nofollow” attributes or PageRank scultping. Has this been a trojan horse that many SEO’s have tried to leverage?

Google views Search Engine Optimization as dangerous, because in many cases it is used to manipulate relevancy of their results. Does that mean there aren’t some things you can and should do to make your content easier to find and index – absolutely you should. Should they be the things that Google specifies in their guidelines – maybe. Should you be very conscious of all your SEO tactics – without a doubt!

We know Google is considering new signals to make search relevant.

I’ve always said SEO shouldn’t be an acronym for Search Engine Optimization (because now if you optimize for search engines you may be profiled as dangerous), but for Searcher Experience Optimization. I recommend that you do great marketing primarily. Then focus on making sure you publish the best content for the person doing a search. When that person has a list of options to choose from in their search engine results page, your content provides them with the best experience.

Is Google likely to find you and your Search Engine Optimization activities criminal? We’ll find out if you are exiled from their listings soon.

When you break that sentence down, you start to understand how to optimize your conversion rate.

Step 1 – Let’s understand “number of people“

Who are these people? Are they all the same? Do they have different characteristics, needs, questions? Do all these people have the same amount of product/service knowledge that you do? Are they all at the same stage in their buying process? Do they know you already? Or have they never heard of you before?

How are you bringing these “number of people” to your website? Do they all come by directly typing your URL in their browser? Do some search for your brand? Do some search for your category? Or your products? Do some of those people come from organic search? paid search? emails? affiliates? Do these people come from different websites: Google? Bing? Yahoo!? Wikipedia? Twitter? Facebook?

Do you launch new marketing efforts regularly? Are the efforts last week different than this week? last month versus this month? Is there an important calendar event occuring (Christmas if you’re a retailer; Fourth of July if you’re a seller of fireworks; Mother’s Day if you sell flowers: etc.?) all of which may induce a “spike” in traffic that is different than usual.

There is no such thing as an average person. That is why your average conversion rate is a rough indicator but virtually worthless as a way to focus your conversion optimization.

You have lots of segments who come to your website. They differ by demographics, psychographics, behavior, or because they came in through very different marketing efforts. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these segments/marketing efforts and you should.

Step 2 – Let’s understand “the action you want them to take”:

If you are in retail, you want them to purchase a product.

If you are in lead generation, you want them to become a lead.

Are there no other actions that are valuable?

In retail, even in they don’t convert now would it at least be more valuable to know if they added an item to your wish list, or subscribed to your newsletter, or looked up your retail store hours, or added items to their cart versus, just bouncing off the site right away? What are you doing to turn that one-time customer into a repeat customer? Do they only need one product you sell or might they need different ones over the course of time?

In lead generation, if they don’t give you all their information and request to be contacted by sales, is it valuable to have them sign up for a whitepaper, or a demo, or your newsletter? Is it better to download specification sheets, engage in calculators, or print or forward pages rather than just bouncing off the website? These are all steps that move people through their buying process.

These are just some of your macro-actions. What happens when someone comes from one of your ads and gets to a landing page? Sometimes the action is one of those listed above, but what if that page is only meant to help your visitors to choose the right product or service and they still need to actually click on the right one for them? What do you do to help them take that action and not bounce away? These are the micro-actions that need to happen from step to step in the potential customer’s visit.

All of these are actions we need to optimize. You can calculate a conversion rate for each one of these macro- and micro-actions, and you should.

Step 3 – Let’s understand “total number of potential people who could have taken that action”

What happened to the majority of visitors who did not convert? Why didn’t they convert?

Did they land on your site incorrectly? For example, they typed in “shingles” into a search engine and they were looking for roof repair and not a skin condition. This is obviously a disqualified visitor. Did they try to purchase from your website and something went wrong? Did they have problems accessing the information? Could they not figure out how to take action on your website? Did they not trust you? Did they leave with questions that were not answered? Did you answer their questions for today, but they aren’t ready to buy now? Did you not instill a sense of urgency or desire in them? Did you not make them a great offer?

You need to optimize your website experience for these potential buyers through the hierarchy of optimization.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are thousands of potential improvements to choose from. You need to prioritize these based on the level of impact that improvement can have and the resources available to execute them. If you don’t have a copywriter available at the moment, you shouldn’t focus on copy changes even if it would be the most impactful. That’s may sound like just common sense, but it catches many companiyes like a deer in headlights.

Your average conversion rate is the aggregated conversion rate of how well your website performs for each of your customer segments, and each of your marketing efforts for each of the actions you want them to take. You optimize your conversion rate by first focusing in on the elements that impact as many of these as you can, and then you have to work on these “micro-funnels.”

While you work on conversions, market conditions, competitive forces, ad copy, and even your customers’ needs change. This is why you need to continuously optimize your marketing efforts. You can’t afford to have a “set it and forget it” mentality to your marketing.

Those of you who have been reading our blog and books for a while might recognize these steps as the fundamental steps of Persuasion Architecture®.

1. Who do we want to take action? This is the “number of people” from step 1.

2. What action do we want them to take? This is “the action you want them to take” from step 2. Have you defined all of these clearly? Are you measuring them properly?

3. What do they need in order to take that action? This is where we analyze what content/effort went into understanding why the “total number of potential people who could have taken that action” didn’t. This is where experience helps a ton.

If you only focus on improving a few landing pages here and there, testing a few variations here and there, tweaking creative here and there you will never reach your highest potential conversion rate!

Don’t worry, your customers won’t go unsatisfied. I guarantee that sooner or later your competitors will figure out how to satisfy your visitors needs. Hopefully that will motivate you to start getting your conversion goals on target by investing in continuous improvement.

In my last post, I made use of a brick and mortar analogy to the current online behavior of some e-commerce Websites, and even recommended the use of those analogies when analyzing online persuasion strategies.

And since at least a few readers responded positively to the idea, I thought I’d share one of Get Elastic’s videos  dramatizing exactly one of those analogies, as well as sharing a link to their whole series.

So welcome to The Crazy, Messed-up World of E-commerce!

And if you haven’t already bookmarked Get Elastic’s blog, go ahead and do that now.

Never?

You mean no one has ever blocked the exit and said something like, “Hey, I saw you put that bottle of wine in your cart, why didn’t you buy it?”

It sounds funny until you realize that most online remarketing services offer to do exactly that to your website visitors.  They’ll pester them with e-mails, pop-ups, and phone calls should they have the bad fortune of visiting your site, adding something to your shopping cart, and then not buying it.

Why would otherwise sane e-tailers revert to such uncivil, gorilla-like tactics?  Really bad assumptions about both human nature and the nature of online shopping.  They simply haven’t compared what they’re doing to that kind of offline analogy.  So here are the bad assumptions, along with a few suggestions on how to correct them and what to do instead:

Assumption #1: Everyone is a late stage buyer

Related assumptions: Everyone who puts something in your shopping cart has a full-blown intent to purchase that item, and it was just chance or a shopping cart flaw that caused them to “abandon” your cart.  Cart abandonment is caused within the cart itself.

Corrections:

• Lots of people research and comparison-shop before they buy.
• Adding an item to cart is often a means of comparison shopping
• Adding an item to cart is often the only way to get important information for making the buying decision – stuff like shipping costs, whether express delivery is available, gift options etc.
• Most lost sales are caused by a lack of information and persuasion on the product page and the rest of the website – not by the cart itself.

Assumption #2: Long-term effects will parallel short-term gain

Related assumptions: sales that you recover from abusive or annoying tactics are easily tied to increased revenue and therefore are more important than the much-harder-to-measure ill will and annoyance created by those same techniques.  That the successes are as cumulative as the ill will generated.

Corrections:

• “He who would run his business with visible figures alone will soon have neither business nor visible figures to work with.”  -    W. Edwards Deming
• Don’t mistake a lack of hate e-mail or complaints as a lack of passionate response.  Or at the least, find out a way to measure the offense or annoyance you’re causing amongst the visitors who you don’t convert through your remarketing efforts.    If more people are converted than are pissed off, and the converted become repeat buyers, then keep doing what you’re doing.  But have the discipline to find out for sure.
• Pissed off people are a lot more likely to share their experiences than a visitor converted through remarketing tactics.  And even the converted visitor will be less likely to do ANY further early stage shopping from you now that they know what to expect from putting an item in your cart or visiting your checkout page.
• Ask any remarketing service what the longer-term trends for their customers have been.  If they can’t tell you overall impact on their clients conversion rates for periods of at least 1-2 years, you should be very, very suspicious.

Assumption #3:  It never hurts to ask.

Related assumptions: that the mere form of a question /offer renders it impossible to offend visitors’ sensibilities or violate their sense of privacy and online safety.

Corrections:

• Read this Seth Godin post
• Imagine that you had only started to fill out a check-out form, had not ever hit any kind of “submit” or “enter” button before closing out, but now have that website e-mailing and calling you because they pulled the info off of their server in real-time, as you typed it into the form.  How do you feel about that?  Think this thing doesn’t happen?  It does.
• A website forces you to create an account in order to checkout.  You create one.  Then you see that they gouge their customers on shipping charges.  You close out of the process and now you’re receiving spam from that company/website.  Are you EVER likely to do business with them in this or any other lifetime?

So are all automated responses and attempts to “save the sale” a bad idea?

Absolutely not.  Just let your offline sense of what’s appropriate guide you in your applications of this online technology. Pushy sales clerks can kill brick and mortar sales just as easily as over-aggressive re-marketing techniques for the simple reason that human nature doesn’t change just because a person goes online.  In fact, I frequently recommend Why We Buy to Web optimization specialists and online copywriters for exactly this reason.

So to use that offline analogy, let’s say you are looking at a more expensive bottle of wine and that the store owner sees you put it back on the shelf to grab a few other cheaper bottles.

Would it be ok for the clerk to approach you, mention that the bottle you were looking at is one of the best buys he has in the store, guarantee you’ll love it, and offer to give you a discount to get you to try a bottle?   Or for him to show you similar bottles closer to your price range?

As long as the clerk was respectful and took “no” for an answer, there’s no problem with that at all, right?  So how could you do it online?

• You could show special offers on previously-deleted-from-the-cart merchandise during the checkout process
• You could have a button on your product page that says “alert me to any specials or discounts on this product,” and then follow-up with a special e-mail offer AFTER the visitor has given you permission to contact them.
• For completed sales – and completed sales ONLY! – you could send a follow-up e-mail with special deals on previously-deleted-from-the-cart merchandise
• And a few other techniques that I’m sure you’ll come up with yourself if you spend some time thinking about it.  I don’t want to give away all my secrets without exacting any mental work from my readers

All of these things work just as well online as their offline counterparts, which is far more than can be said for most “gorilla” (re)marketing tactics.

P.S.  Before going through all this trouble to remarket, why not make sure you’ve fully optimized your checkout process to begin with?  Bryan Eisenberg’s initial and follow-up blog posts on this are a great place to start.

It all boils down to credibility.  Customer reviews simply have more credibility than your sales copy, so they inspire more confidence in the buyer.  And negative reviews lend credibility to the review process itself, standing as visible proof that the reviews are not edited.

Makes sense right?  Sure it does, until you find yourself staring at the (perceived) ability of a blisteringly negative review to crush your sales of a given product or service. Then those other statistics and facts are easier to overlook.

So if you’re in that position, just consider this quote from an Amazon.com review:

“…You may find it extremely interesting that I am leaving a review on Amazon because the company I actually bought the product from DID NOT post my lukewarm review. In fact, all the reviews on their website are nothing but 5 star, positive and glowing. I abhor this manner of conducting business and felt the public had a right to know ALL personal experience with this product, not just the 5 that are wonderful…”

When it comes to possible venues for negative online reviews there are:

• forums for any number of interests
• scores of review sites available online
• blogs,
• and FaceBook, Twitter, YouTube, and new social media platforms popping up every day.

There’s simply no shortage of online venues for posting negative reviews.

And what do you think happens to your credibility when negative reviews (of one of your products) are easy to find on the web, but non-existent on your website?

Here’s another example:

About three weeks ago I installed some Dream Home laminate flooring in my recently enclosed garage.  I bought it from a nationally known flooring wholesaler, Lumber Liquidators.  The product was supposed to be “click & lock,” floating flooring, except there was no click, and the boards didn’t really lock together.   So the boards could, and in fact did, come apart as I got several layers into the project.  Gaps would appear and I’d have to undo and then redo all those layers to fix them.

Unbelievably frustrating and a total pain in the butt.

Yet the product reviews, which were balanced between 4 and 5 stars, never said anything about this.  The FAQ never said anything about this.  Customer service said they’d never had customer encounter this problem before.  Apparently, it was just a freak, unexplained phenomenon – a flooring mystery!

Then I Googled “Dream Home Laminate Flooring” and was led to a DIY-forum full of people who experienced the exact same thing I had.  We’re talking like 30 posts of customer experience with the product.  And yet none of these mixed or bad reviews had ever ended up on Lumber Liquidator’s site and they – the only people who sell this product – had never heard of the main installation problem mentioned.

To be fair, some of these reviews/forum posts were very positive, mentioning the reviewers installation struggles in passing or in good humor, and some of the forum members/posters were outraged, trashing on the product and its country of origin.  But all these reviews, both good and bad, were available to me from the 1st search engine result from Google.  It’s not like they were hidden or I had to hunt these down or anything.

The point: Your brand and product perception is not what you say it is anymore but what Google says it is.

Removing negative reviews from your site doesn’t mean they disappear; it just means there’s now a mismatch between what you say and what Google tells me your customers say.  I mean, how much credibility do you think Lumber Liquidators had with me after I found that forum?

While I couldn’t say for certain whether they were editing their reviews, by that time, you could say I was rather suspicious.  So I wrote my own fair but not overwhelmingly positive review.  I gave the product 3 stars, said the installed floor looked nice and was a great price, but that it was a total pain in the butt to install and that the click & lock feature neither clicked nor locked.  I even confirmed my identity to ensure the review went through.

About a week later, my review has still not posted.  Yesterday I called to find out why and Customer Service couldn’t answer me, said someone would get back to me on that issue.

Of course, I still can’t say for certain whether or not Lumber Liquidators is editing their reviews.  It’s possible I’m the first person who has ever given that product a negative review.  It’s possible that all their products, just about every single one, actually do score 4s and 5s with nary a low score in the bunch (though I DID see one 2-star review for one of their products when I went hunting for lower-scored reviews – but only ONE of them, mind you).

Still, for the sake of example, let’s just say – hypothetically speaking – that they do edit negative reviews, including my review.  Let me ask you this: did that strategy work for them?  Did they stop the review, or did they just switch its location?

And had I known about the difficulty of the flooring, would it really have ruined their sale, or just helped me to expect and work around the installation challenges – or even just pushed me to buy a more expensive (and easier to install) product from them?

Personally, I think negative reviews would have worked in their favor.  And I hope you now grasp the emotional (as well as the statistical) truth of that, too.

P.S.  While I continue to be suspicious of the Lumber Liquidators website, I have to say that their Pensacola branch, and the people working there, were very pleasant to do business with and I’d still recommend them to friends and family looking to DIY install hardwood, engineered, or laminate flooring.

Would you be willing to lie? Cheat? Steal?

I didn’t think so. Most of us wouldn’t.

How about just ever so slightly burying a fact — one that’s essential and potentially harmful to your sales — at the bottom of the page?

Now you judge.

My Little Tale

One day several weeks ago, I noticed my Apple MacBook Pro laptop battery was driving toward a slow and painful death. As so often happens with those of us who use a laptop for a primary machine, we can often just wear the poor thing down to its lithium ion bones.

I started to talk about it a bit around the office, and got a very good recommendation from a colleague. He had purchased a battery made by a third-party for his MacBook Pro and was pleased with it. The battery was less expensive than the brand name manufacturer’s replacement and boasted a 50 percent plus higher capacity.

So week before last I got the URL from John, and with credit card in hand I went to FastMac.com, easily found the exact battery I needed, added it to my cart, and quickly completed an order. I bought it without even reading the product description; John’s good experience was sufficient enough for me to plop down $99 “sight unseen.” I can’t imagine I’m the only person who does this on occasion.

As you may already know, in the universe of Apple users, word of mouth travels far and fast. So you might also not be surprised to hear the news that at the time I bought the battery, it was completely sold out.

That would have been a nice thing to know before I handed over my credit card number.

This is the part of the story where my blood begins to simmer a bit, so please excuse me if my column starts to teem with a bit of anger.

You see, I needed this battery before I hit the road next week. So on Monday, I returned to the site to check the status of my order. I was a bit irked to find that my order still had not been shipped and was marked as “in process.”

Where’s Waldo?

Then I went on a hunt to determine exactly what was going on. I wanted my battery and I wanted it yesterday. After a little bit of time and diligence, I finally discovered that this particular laptop battery was out of stock until May.

In all fairness, technically, that information was on the Web site when I made the purchase.

Click on this thumbnail image or visit the page and see if you can find it.

Waldo was a little less elusive than this information.

Maybe it was easier for you to find it than me — even when I was intentionally looking for it. But I was never good at Waldo. Even if your visitors were award-winning Waldo hunters, you shouldn’t force them to scroll, squint, and break a sweat to find information important to their buying decision.

Additionally, I didn’t see this information anywhere in the checkout process.

Why did the team at FastMac.com place this information where they did? Did they think that simply placing it on the page means that people would actually read it? Do they have an actual technical challenge that somehow makes it difficult to place this information higher up on the page?

Maybe I’m jaded, but did they deliberately place it at the very bottom of the page to ensure better conversion? I have to ask, especially for a specialty e-commerce site like this with limited SKUs (define).

Here was my message to FastMac.com sales:

I’d like to cancel my order #37959. When something is out of stock for as long as this is — you should let people know on the top of the page or near the add to cart button. I lost a week waiting to see what happened to my order and I had no idea the item was out of stock. I am extremely frustrated.

And here was FastMac’s response:

Hi Bryan
Thanks for contacting us.
I am sorry for the inconvenience.
I will inform our sales department regarding your experience and will make the necessary adjustments.
I’ve also informed our accounting department and we cancelled your order.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to send us an email

Fastmac Customer Service

As of my writing, the page is exactly the same and they still haven’t followed my request to place the information near the “add to cart” button.

What Would You Have Done?

Am I overreacting? Am I the one to blame here? Should I have read the entire page before I hit “add to cart”?

What would your e-commerce site have done? Would you have been more transparent? How would you have responded to my contact form?

Was this a moral decision/situation? Where does a vendor’s obligation end and the customer’s responsibility begin?

How does your company handle decisions like this?

I’ll be happy to share what you share in my next column.

Many people have commented in past posts about ProFlower.com’s incredible conversion rates. You’ll often see them with a conversion rate over 30%. However, most people won’t dedicate the necessary resources they need to achieve such success. Over at EM&C, they cover what’s behind Proflowers.com’s incredible conversion rate by looking at their email marketing.

Here are a 7 things you can do to improve your email marketing performance:

1. Delete your entire email list! You might not need to be as drastic as this however, list hygiene is important for ensuring email deliverability.

2. Segment your email list. Don’t treat everyone like they are the same.

3. Follow the email marketing secrets of other top converting websites (lots of tips here). Your write as you read. Subscribe to as many of the top converting website newsletters and review them regularly.

4. Rework your content to maximize the dynamics behind gr8 web 2.0 copywriting. People have changed their preferences on how they consume content online – have you revised the way your email marketing is written? Be innovative and relevant. Leverage the voice of your customer as well. Are you leveraging social media as well?

5. Improve your landing pages – test, test and optimize again. You don’t want your email marketing to suck. You need to always be testing.

6. Don’t send emails in the dark. Make sure your emails are being tracked by web analytics all the way through the conversion funnel and that you are making improvements and optimizing along the way.

7. Review all your auto-generated emails like your thank you for your order, subscriber or lead confirmation, autoresponders, etc. Make sure the dates are correct, unsubscribe links work (you don’t want to end up like this company), review what is being said, etc. Make sure to plan for more intelligent, dynamically generated emails based on visitor activity.

P.S. It never hurts to have an outside perspective to review your email marketing for you.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, do you think that might have some rather profound effects on Domino’s marketing efforts?  Think you’ll be eating at Domino’s anytime soon?

What’s interesting is that the basic principle behind this was predicted not by some far-seeing futurist working in the technology field, but by Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Charles C. Krulak.

Gen. Krulak coined the term “strategic corporal” to refer to the possible strategic foreign policy impact of actions taken by individual Marines in an age of universal media coverage and counter-insurgency warfare:

“In many cases, the individual Marine will be the most conspicuous symbol of American foreign policy and will potentially influence not only the immediate tactical situation, but the operational and strategic levels as well. His actions, therefore, will directly impact the outcome of the larger operation; and he will become, as the title of this article suggests – the Strategic Corporal.”

Since the publication of Gen Krulak’s article in 1999, the rise of cell phone video cameras, YouTube, and twitter have further amplified the potential impact of local, tactical actions of seemingly “lower-level” or front-line individuals.

Granted, minimum wage workers operate in a far less dramatic and less-threatening arena than Marines, but the above video offers a stark example of the far reaching strategic impact of their actions.

The Marine Corps response to this has always been to recruit the very best individuals possible and to push decision-making and responsibility as far down the chain of command as possible. Many successful businesses take a similar approach with their front-line workers.  And the results pay-off when the great actions of individual employees hit the social media echo chamber.

What is (or what will be) your organization’s response?

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.

I can think of many people who I would enjoy spending the day with, but the person I would choose may be a bit obscure for most people. I would like to spend the day with Scott Cook. For those of you who don’t know who he is, Cook is the founder of Intuit, the billion dollar+ company behind Quicken and QuickBooks. A gifted entrepreneur, who took listening to his customers to the next level with Intuit’s “Follow Me Home” program. Intuit is a wonderful organization built on customer centricity, continuous improvement and enjoys a rich data driven culture.

An Inc magazine article writes about Cook:

“…Cook knew that if he and his company could just be alert and creative and open-minded enough, then making it so was possible, because would-be customers could tell them how.

He was right. So right, in fact, that during Intuit’s second decade, Cook says, customers “invented our mid-market business before we even saw the possibility.” Entrepreneurs had begun using Quicken to run the finances of their companies, modifying the program to suit their needs. When Intuit finally caught on, it listened again and created Quickbooks, a business finance program that now accounts for 15% of the company’s sales. (Small-business products and services as a whole account for 45%.)

And here’s where it can be argued that the impact of Cook’s work has been exponentially greater than merely what’s reflected in the billion-dollar business he’s built–that by pioneering the tools that made financial management possible for so many individuals and company builders, he and Intuit taught an entire country important things about business, and for many people made entrepreneurship itself possible, too.”

Avinash Kaushik (it would be great if he could join us too on this day, but that’s cheating) always speaks so highly of his former boss, Scott Cook. I think Scott could help me learn in a day what it takes to grow a software business. That’s especially important now with  FutureNow’s new business model that features OnTarget software-as-a-service. The goal of OnTarget is to make website optimization simple for every business the way QuickBooks did for bookkeeping.

Who would you choose to spend the day with?