Online Persuasion
Top Ten Best (and Worst) Communicators of 2007
Bert Decker trains executives to communicate better. He’s nationally recognized as a persuasive presentation coach and has an impressive client list. Not only is he a friend but we send people to his trainings. That’s why his “Top Ten Best (and Worst) Communicators of 2007” is a must-read.
I’ll give you his top three, but you’ll have to read the post for the other seven and Bert’s analysis.
Top Three Best
1) Gov. Mike Huckabee — What but for communicating would get a presidential candidate so far so fast?
2) Dr. Mehmet Oz — He became “America’s Doctor” in one short year, because of his communications (and Oprah of course.)
3) Al Gore — Even if he hadn’t won the Academy Award, Al Gore would get the communicator’s comeback of the year award.
Top Three Worst
1) Alberto Gonzales — He not only lied, but showed he was lying because of his behaviors.
2) Michael Vick — When you want your public AND the judges empathy, it is not the time to ‘gut it out’ and put on a stone face.
3) Robert Eckert — The Chairman of Mattel was caught in a toy recall disaster probably not of his making, but ‘the buck stops here.’
This is a long post with lots of worthwhile meaty commentary.
Read the “Top Ten Best (and Worst) Communicators of 2007” for yourself.
P.S. Barack Obama has proven to be an excellent communicator. It’s not just what he is saying but how he’s saying it that’s turning people on. I’m registered as an Independent, and I’m not yet committed to any candidate, but he’s making a great case for himself.
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Revenge of the Pixels: The Battle for Screen Real Estate
Designing web pages is challenging. Unlike almost any other media, a web design’s integrity is compromised by the nature of a fluid medium. In other words, just because you want something to look a certain way doesn’t guarantee it will — differing browsers, resolutions, screen sizes, monitor calibrations and operating systems all distort the experience.
The one good habit I’ve picked up over the years: learn to compromise. Compromise, however, should be done intelligently and accountably.
One of the more contentious issues in web design presents itself when deciding where specific elements should go and how much space they should occupy. This is especially true in cases where politics (read: Who’s the most important person in the room?) rules. In print, such as in catalogs, they often look to cost and revenue per square inch. We’ll do something similar.
A popular technique we’ve developed over the years for removing politics from these important decisions is the Battleship Grid. The Battleship Grid is where you divide a page into a grid of horizontal and vertical lines of approximately equal size. (I’ll explain why it’s approximate shortly.) The main purpose for using this tool is to spark conversation. Click on the thumbnail image to see an example for a page from Dell.com.
How does the Battleship Grid work?
Let’s say you’re reviewing a page at 1024 x 768 resolution. Using Photoshop or an equivalent graphics program (or have your designer do this for you), work across the page, draw vertical lines up and down the screen. Create 10 rows, labeled “A” to “J”. Then, start drawing horizontal lines across the page. The first horizontal line is right underneath the top navigation. (Do this because your visitors are already subconsciously focusing on the center area, or “active window”. This is why I said “approximately equal size” above). After creating this line, add lines every 10 pixels, labeling them “1″ to “8″.
In Photoshop, add a layer where you can overlay the grid with different colors at 30% opacity (just enough so that they are visible and you can see the elements behind them on the page). Next, begin to assign values to the different areas of the grid. The values assigned to each of the shaded regions aren’t absolute; they’re relative values, and should be considered rough guidelines. You can follow what I set out in my example. I came up with these values, for the sake of simplicity, based on certain eyetracking, design composition, and vision physiology guidelines.
The area I assign the highest “value” to is the “active window” (see thumbnail). As Jakob Nielsen pointed out as early as January of 2000, “For almost seven years, my studies have shown the same user behavior: users look straight at the content and ignore the navigation areas when they scan a new page.”
Every eyetracking study in which I’ve participated has shown the exact same visitor behavior. It’s also important to understand human physiology and how the eyes view a page. Any artist who’s studied composition knows the “Rule of Thirds“. It’s a good guideline for understanding how people’s eyes naturally take in what they see, so you know where to place things yow wish to draw attention to naturally.
This, by the way, is why it’s so important to test your headlines; it’s usually the one thing virtually everyone sees on your page. Make it count.
How do you use the Battleship Grid?
Take a screenshot of the page in question at a 1024 x 768 resolution. Overlay this grid on top of it. Then, work with your team to agree to the values assigned to differing zones. Review elements in the high-value real estate zones. This is all about deconstructing size, design, and placement of elements for maximum impact.
For each design element, ask yourself:
- How much space does it occupy? Should it take more or less?
- What calls to actions are there? Are they obvious?
- Can it hold its own weight? Should some elements be moved to maximize effectiveness?
- Do the visual elements attract the different personality types?
- (You can also gray out anything customer’s don’t actually care about and ask these questions again.)
Now, take another look at the Dell.com Battleship Grid. What are your observations of the design? Are they under-utilizing any areas?
Limitations: Please be careful with this tool. It’s not meant to be scientific. It’s much better than the absence of not designing with any accountability. Depending on your design, you can skew how visitors engage with the site by using:
- strong, contrasting colors — You may have a form you want filled out in the right-hand column with, say, a monochromatic design, or one with minimal color compared to the rest of the design. If so, try placing a color-shaded background behind the form to make it stand out.
- a powerful image or by image placement — Most eyetracking heatmaps show that visitors spend virtually no time looking at loosely framed “lifestyle” images (e.g., a picture of executives shaking hands over a conference table). On the other hand, having a single closeup image of someone’s face can draw a lot of attention — especially when it’s above the fold. Keep in mind, if you use this technique, the person in the image should have their eyes facing the action — or content — you want them to focus on. Never have the subject looking straight at the visitor. It will distract them.
- different column widths — The active window for people who read left-to-right begins just beyond where the left-hand column ends. If there is no left-hand navigation, make sure to have enough empty “buffer” space from the browser for visitors’ eyes to settle.
- bigger text for headlines and larger-sized versions for key visual elements — Make sure the copy is formatted for people to scan and skim. Have headlines and sub-headers that stand out next to the body text.
Warning: It’s not advisable to yell at a colleague that you sank their battleship when minimizing or removing one of their preferred elements. 
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Written by:Bryan Eisenberg
Stop Being a “More-on”!
Impotent call to action hyperlinks like “read more,” “click here,” and “submit” sometimes make me feel embarrassed for the website owner. They should know better.
On Lost Remote, Don Day’s TV blog, he got me thinking again about calls to action:
“Don’t be a “more-on” ….That’s a mantra I repeat in our newsroom often. Why it’s so easy to write a generic, cookie cutter web tease that says “for more on this story, log on to our website at klmn.com.” Dumb. Very few viewers will actually follow through.”
Dan is right and what he says applies to the Web.
Persuasive call to action hyperlinks should include an imperative verb and a benefit.
For example, which hyperlink is more persuasive: A or B?
A. Steve found an investment secret that changed his life. Read More
B. Steve found an investment secret that changed his life. See how Steve doubled his income in one year.
This technique is easy to learn. So, please, stop being a more-on!
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P.S. There is a framework for thinking about writing effective calls to action. Would you like to learn more about registering for our Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar?
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Amen Brother!!! Down With “Users”
We’re sick of the term ‘users,’ and we’ve been unhappy with it publicly for many years. So congratulations to Josh Bernoff for puting his foot down and saying enough is enough. Users is a terrible term . It puts everyone in the wrong state of mind. Users don’t come to your website - people do. Give people a great experience in a scenario that reflects their buying process, and they won’t just become your users; they will become your customers.
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Foxy One-Page Proposals
Our friend, and fellow Wizard Academy faculty member, Mark L. Fox put together a video about “The One-Page Proposal: How to Get Your Business Pitch onto One Persuasive Page” by Patrick G. Riley.
Click through for a brief video overview of a One-Page Proposal. The one-page proposal is a communication tool that can get an idea moving forward, cut through the clutter, and get to a decision–quickly.
Isn’t communicating effectively always harder than it seems?
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Does Anyone Really Click on Sponsored Links in Gmail?
My mom does! I don’t even pay attention to them, let alone click on them.
I set her up with a Gmail account over a year ago and she spends a good amount of time exchanging communications with friends, family and reading her newsletters. She also likes to read a few newsletters about self-motivation and self-improvement she’s signed-up for.
She was visiting with me recently and asked for my assistance to get out of a survey site she was on. I asked
how she got there in the first place and she told me that, while she was reading a newsletter, she noticed the link above the window that asked, “Are you a slacker mom? Click here to find out.” Genius!
She clicks and gets sent to AreYouASlackerMom.com; three pages of questions in a survey format without any explanation at the beginning of what this survey is, how it might benefit the visitor, how long it will take, or what the visitor will be asked to provide in return (e.g., personal information).
My mom, being patient, clicks through and answers the questions anyway. Until…
She gets to the final part, where she’s asked for her email address and name. There’s no privacy copy here
reassuring her that her information is safe. My mom has one email address, therefore she can’t do what a lot of us are guilty of; just giving our Hotmail “spam email” address. My mom wanted to bail, but what’s even funnier is how frustrated she got by wanting to bail, not even knowing how to get back to Gmail because the back button wasn’t bringing her back!
So, yes… obviously, people are clicking on sponsored links in Gmail, but what you choose to do with these visitors after they click is what makes me scratch my head.
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Written by:Melissa Burdon
Xerox Tries Viral, Catches Cold
We were just contacted by Xerox PR. Here’s what they wrote to us:
Form Comments: I wanted to let you know about a new advertising and online marketing campaign Xerox is launching this week aimed at the office market. This is a campaign that is a bit different than typical Xerox campaigns ….
For one thing — I can tell you we’ve never offered customers a virtual goat, diversion maker or acronymanator (I couldn’t even being to explain- you might as well try it out for yourself at www.frugalcolor.com) Also on the site are some funny office videos we hope folks will send to friends.
The goal of the campaign is to raise awareness of how cost effective
Xerox office color products are and how they really are the right choice for the frugal office!TV ads that again - are not typical Xerox ads - will begin airing this week on cable networks and over the weekend on major networks. The first one airing features a “mute” button and it’s basically everyone’s nightmare when it comes to mute buttons!
This campaign comes on the heels of a very successful viral campaign in Europe that yielded over 1 million views as of last week. (to see this ad click on: www.extremeoffices.com)
This new color campaign is one example of how Xerox is serious about
reaching out to the marketplace using new media. If you’d like to chat with someone about our advertising and marketing programs, please give me or my colleague, XXXXXXXXXX, a call.
Their words and website speak for themselves. If you’re wondering about my reaction, I clicked through, heard the music (ugh!) and, after the site loaded, I had no idea what they wanted me to do; nor does it motivate me to do anything at all, other than leave. Do you think my visit was counted as a measure of success?
I can’t be the only one who thinks Xerox needs to rethink their strategy?
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
Thick Heads, PPC, B2B Demand Generation, and Converting Visitors
I have four kids that range in age from 4- to- 13. I must confess, sometimes being a marketing consultant feels too much like my nagging daddy role.
Anyone with kids knows the routine when you impart your wonderful child with a bit of wisdom.
“Son, do you want to get hurt?”
“No, Daddy”
“Then please don’t jump on the bed!”
“Ok, Daddy”
Simple, right?
Then, about 8 minutes later, comes that ear shattering scream. Your son is curled up on the floor, clutching his thick head, sporting a fresh bump from a nasty tumble. Seems he was jumping on the bed.
Our faithful are likely tired of hearing the same conversion rate rants from us. For the rest, it’s not until after they take a tumble that they decide jumping on the bed is a bad idea.
Jon Miller at Search Engine Land posted a great article describing why B2Bs are typically unsatisfied with PPC agencies, wherein he makes a bold suggestion that B2Bs should abandon PPC agencies altogether. Here’s a nice little nugget from the post:
You know your business better than the agency. One of the most important skills for PPC success is picking the right keywords that your prospects actually use when they search – something you know best. Also, when determining rankings, Google and now Yahoo! care as much about the relevance of your content as they do about your bid (aka “what you say is as important as what you pay”). This means a good understanding of your business and your industry is at least as important as being a search “expert”. Over time, the balance of power between business knowledge and SEM knowledge will shift even further towards business as Google continues to find ways to reward relevant content and discount search agency tricks.
While Jon makes a stunningly accurate diagnosis, his suggested treatment is questionable:
The main value provided by agencies is expertise with SEM, and as I’ll explain, you can bring much of that expertise in-house by using the right kind of pay per click management software. A technology solution can create the best of both worlds: the control and business knowledge of doing it yourself, combined with the SEM best practices and techniques of an expert.
We love technology as much as the next guy, it makes life easier. But in-house technology and SEM best practices will likely still leave you dissappointed. Sure you’ll save their fees, and possibly see some incremental gains but unless you embrace a persuasion methodology, you are just jumping on the bed.
How do you find the right keywords? How do you ensure your prospects are being presented with relevant scent from the ad to the lead form? How do you optimize and measure every variant? What if you don’t have any ‘experts’ on staff?
By giving non-marketing experts a methodology for maximizing demand generation, Persuasion Architecture™ and Persuasive Scenarios are proven to solve this dilemma.
Bryan Eisenberg touched on just one aspect of B2B demand generation last week’s Clickz column.
Sure, it’s hard work, but the only thing harder is ending up with knot after knot on your head.
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
Search Engine Marketing and the 2008 Election
All politics aside, observing the 2008 US Presidential election from a marketing perspective alone will be quite fascinating.
How effective will the candidates be at using the the web and all it’s mojo? techPresident is a blog set up to do just that, check out this post about how the current candidates are utilizing (or not) Google Pay Per Click (PPC).
It’s time all candidates recognize the power of search to drive highly-targeted traffic to their fledgling websites. Get cracking, everyone! We’re watching.
We’ll be watching as well, and I am sure we can find a few great lessons to share with you about online persuasion.
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Written by:Anthony Garcia
7 BIG Questions for Online Marketers
We hear the questions businesses ask: How do I increase my sales or leads? How do I get more traffic to my site? How do I get better search engine rankings? How do I get fewer customers to abandon their shopping carts? What do I do with all this data I’m getting from my analytics software?
These are important questions.
Ask a Bigger Question
What makes people buy? When you focus on this question, all the subsequent details fall much more easily into place. This is not a word game; it’s a change in perspective. Without a proper strategy, you can win every battle and still lose the war.
Tactics: The Unspoken Assumptions
Whenever businesses tackle optimization, site design or redesign, they start with a set of assumptions. Very often, these assumptions depend on a granular, detail-oriented view of the problem as the business sees it (from the perspective of the business, not the customer). Very often, the problem is couched in the language of “best practices”, a series of tactics. However, to paraphrase Sun Tzu, tactics applied without strategy are the noise before defeat.
Asking a “bigger question” broadens your view of your situation beyond the details; bigger questions often lead you to reevaluate your strategies, which in turn allows you to devise more effective tactics. The critical answers to these bigger questions—the answers that meet your specific needs—can only from you.
7 Online Marketing Challenges & How to Frame Them as Bigger Questions
Here’s a list of the top seven challenges clients put to us, with their variations. We reframe them through bigger questions to target the deeper issues that influence your marketing effectiveness.
1. “We need to reach more people.”
Sometimes you simply need to reach more people. You need to improve your search engine rankings; you need to add more keywords to your search engine marketing; you need to find new or more places to advertise; you need to grow your list; you need to advertise offline; you need viral marketing; you need to increase the number of links to your site; you need to add or modify an affiliate program, and other variations on this theme.
Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:
- Are enough of the people coming to our website sufficiently satisfied with what we present that they buy, or does our presentation damage our reputation and create an impediment to buying?
- Are enough of the people who buy from us sufficiently delighted to purchase again, are we wasting resources by driving new traffic?
- Do we provide enough of the right information for people to return even when they are not ready to buy right now?
- Are we focused more on marketing to the search engines or marketing to the people who visit our site?
2. “We need to reach better people.”
Sometimes you simply need to reach better people. You need to target more appropriate publications; you need to select better keywords; you need to source better lists; you need to find more qualified buyers; you need to reach your competitor’s customers; you need to reach people when they are ready to buy; you need the right content to attract search engine traffic, and other variations on this theme.
Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:
- If we reach those people, do we have relevant content for them when they are in the early, middle and late stages of their buying process?
- Is our offering so narrow that there are too few “better” people?
- Does the buyer only identify the need and buy on a very short time horizon, such that we need to find them before they have the need?
- Is the message we’ve been telling the “wrong” people strong enough for them to reach out and tell the “better” people?
3. “We need more resources.”
Sometimes you simply need more resources. You need more money; your need enough time; you need the right consultant; you need better-skilled people; you need the right talent; you need the right vendor; you need to justify your opportunity costs, and other variations on this theme.
Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:
- Do our priorities and goals match our resource allocations?
- Do we commit our resources based on predicted rates of return?
- Do we hold people accountable for those returns when allocating new resources?
- If we don’t have the resources or time to do it correctly now, when will we have the resources or time; when, exactly, will we commit to do it?
4. “We need better testing and usability.”
Sometimes you simply need better testing and usability. You need to make it easy to buy from you; you need to make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for; you need to make it easy to checkout; you need to get feedback from visitors; you need to set up tests and watch how visitors vote with their mice; you need to test to isolate which variables are most important to your visitors; you need to test to see which offers work best, and variations on this theme.
Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:
- What motivates people to buy even when sites aren’t usability-friendly?
- If usability is the only critical factor, why haven’t conversion rates improved in any meaningful way over the last five years, when attention to usability has increased dramatically?
- What if what we’re testing is only what we can think of, but the problem lies in what we haven’t thought of yet; which variables are truly significant and which are not?
- How do we know that pages further up or down the click-stream don’t affect the test we are conducting on one page?
- Do our scientific tests include an hypothesis of the outcome, a theory for why we expect the outcome and a statistically meaningful sample size so we can validate or refute our hypothesis and learn from the results; can we apply that learning more broadly to other situations?
- Would different click-through paths for different audience segments give us a cumulatively higher conversion than the best average conversion?
5. “We need to redesign.”
Sometimes you simply need to redesign. You need to scrap what isn’t working for you; you need more persuasive copy; you need more persuasive or illustrative images; you need to refresh your company image; you need to update your technology; you’ve added so many pieces to the original design that you need to reconceive it, and variations on this theme.
Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:
- Do we need a redesign or do we need to make what we have work?
- Why will the redesigned site better serve visitors?
- How, exactly, will the redesigned site better serve visitors?
- Why are the best-converting sites so often boring in their design?
- Will our redesign incorporate a scientific testing methodology that will allow us to optimize click-streams based on a prediction of how different audience segments will engage with the site?
6. “We need better metrics.”
Sometimes you simply need better metrics. You need to measure the impact on conversion of the elements on your website; you need a good web analytics program; you need to turn your data into wisdom so you can act upon it; you need to measure whether your predictions were correct; you need to identify what campaigns, keywords, elements and audience segments give you the best return on your investment, and variations on this theme.
Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:
- How can we better implement the web analytics program we are currently; do we understand how the data we collect impacts our financial statements?
- Are our metrics based on the way we set up our website to sell or on our visitors’ buying cycles and buying modalities?
- Do our metrics help us refine our website to meet visitor expectations?
- Have we identified and planned an intentional path so that metrics can help us separate the signal from the noise or is our analysis an attempt to divine order from randomness?
7. “We need a better Conversion Rate.”
Sometimes you simply need a better conversion rate. You need a better return on investment on your traffic; you need to remove obstacles to conversion; you need to plug the holes in your leaky bucket; you need to reduce shopping cart abandonment; you need visitors to complete more lead generation forms; you need more business, and variations on this theme.
Bigger questions to explore and ask yourself:
- How does our conversion rate affect our advertising and promotional budget?
- If we could attract a drastically reduced audience that converts better, we’ve increased our conversion rate. Are we prepared to reduce our conversion rate if we can generate more sales at an acceptable return on investment?
- If what we are offering is good, what are all the potential reasons why someone wouldn’t convert today, in 30 days, in 60 days, etc.?
- What is the percentage of visitors we would expect to lose to each of our potential reasons?
- After identifying all the potential reasons why someone wouldn’t convert, if we can’t justify why our conversion rate is less than 20%, why would we set our goals so much lower than that?
- Is it possible that the strategy that helps you increase the average conversion rate isn’t the strategy that would produce the most overall sales or best results?
- Would different click-through paths for different audience segments give us a cumulatively higher conversion than the best average conversion?
Meeting your challenges
Time and again we have learned that the answers to these bigger questions, which depend on a critical appraisal and an intimate knowledge of the business, its marketplace, its audience and its objectives, make the difference when it comes to being successful online.
You can tackle these bigger questions yourself. Objectivity and being able to see outside the box that defines your current situation will best serve the quality of your answers.
What happens if you don’t want to rethink your challenges or to identify more effective marketing solutions? Things stay the same, and you never realize your potential.
What happens if you’re unsure how to, or can’t, rethink your challenges?
Well, that’s why we’re here!
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
