Unanswered questions keep visitors from buying/converting — that’s not theory; it’s a fact!

So why, oh why, would you knowingly allow your persuasive copy to ignore a frequently asked question?  Why would you possibly be content with hiding the answers to your prospective customers’ questions in an FAQ page?  Are you trying to weed out all but the most determined of customers?

While I don’t have confirmed experimental numbers to back this up (yet), common sense says that for every customer willing to search for an answer on an FAQ page, there are dozens more who simply give up on the purchase or look to your competitors for the answer.

So instead of erecting a sign saying, “Beware of persuasive pothole, please drive around this hole by visiting our FAQ page,” and hoping your visitors are motivated and alert enough to navigate such an alternate route, why not simply fix the persuasive gaps in your copy.  Here’s how to do that:

If you currently have a FAQ Page, Here’s What to Do/Check

1) Determine where visitors are most likely to access your FAQ page. Look at your analytics to see where visitors are within their site visit/shopping process when they attempt to look at your FAQ. Do they do this early on in the process or later,  as a last resort?

2) Get a sense of context by going to those identified FAQ access pages.  You’re not just interested in the questions themselves, but in the context in which they are asked, so look at the page in terms of why visitors would be on that page.  Note that a persona-based or scenario-based analysis helps with this.

3) Go to your FAQ page and think about the emotional concerns behind the questions. Here are a few examples taken from actual FAQ pages, along with the emotional concerns that probably underlie those questions:

• Will we have access to the instructor to ask questions during the online ____ course? Translation: “how interactive is this course – how much better is it than just buying a book or a CD  DIY-type course?“  Going one step deeper: “I’m afraid I might not get the support I need to actually improve my skill level — how can you reassure me that your course will help me actually kick ass, rather than being an unused resource that makes me depressed about my own personal suck-factor?”
• How long will a [durable home good] last? Translation: “you’re asking a premium price and presenting yourself as the last ____, I’ll ever need – so what kind of proof do you have/historically, exactly how long will one of these suckers hold out?”
• How do I know that my ____ is working correctly? Translation 1: “You’ve sold me on the theoretical benefits of your fancy schmancy _____, but I still feel like I might be getting suckered, so how can I confirm for myself that your device is really doing what you say before my 30-day refund clock runs out.“  Translation 2: “I know this is crucial to making sure my ____ doesn’t die an early death, so how can I reassure myself that I’m not breaking my very expensive and brand-new _____?”
• What are your return/exchange/warranty policies? Translation: “Hey, idiot, you were too stupid to put any kind of point of action assurance near your buy/add to cart buttons and I’m not about to give you my money without knowing this stuff.”
• What differentiates you from other _____? Translation: “Someone told me I should check you out, but I’m not impressed so far – either you’re oblivious as to how hard you’re making it for me to figure out what you do and why I should do business with you, or you just plain suck; so which is it?”
• What kind of care/cleaning/maintenance does ____ require? Translation: How will this fit into my life?  Will I have to baby this thing?  Can it handle the normal knocks and dings of daily life without falling apart?  In 6 months or 2 years, will I look back on this purchase as a waste?

4) If you have live chat or a published phone number, comb through those records or ask your customer service reps for the questions people ask and where they are on the site when they launch the chat service or call in.  Once you have the list of questions gleened from Live Chat and Phone trasncripts/experience, repeat the process used in #3 by examining the emotions and concerns behind the question. How do those results differ from your FAQ?

5) Address underlying concerns or questions within your regular Website copy. You don’t necessarily have to do it with copy, as pictures, testimonials, videos, user reviews and other site elements can also address these concerns, but make sure the questions get answered.

Are there any excuses for having a FAQ?

Well….yeah.  Sometimes when you really need a “knowledge base” library, but you don’t want to call it that, or when you want to make the hard core geeks in your audience feel better about asking their un-frequently asked questions, a FAQ page can work.  Just make sure you ALWAYS provide links back to sales pages from within your FAQ answers.  Once you’ve answered the visitor’s question, move them back onto a persuasive path.

Oh, and sometimes there are some Q&A’s you might actually want to hide, like in this Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 FAQ – notice the first question ; )

But seriously, realize that an FAQ is basically a junk drawer; you’re shoving stuff there because you haven’t taken the time to find a proper home for it.  You realize this question may come up, but you haven’t figured out where it would come up – do the hard work to uncover the context and emotion behind the question and finding a better place for the answer within your copy becomes relatively easy.

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

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.

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

Why?

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

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

Trading away Dennis Rodman as a Non-performing Player?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answer: 4 out of 5.

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

Bringing Clarity and Orientation to Web Improvement Efforts

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

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

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

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

Tip 1: Subiminal Suggestion

Basically, make sure your design elements – and most especially your pictures – enhance your credibility and put visitors in the right emotional frame of mind to convert.

Sound advice, to be sure, but the example Website the author (Dmitry Fadeyev) provides seemed kind of lame to me.  Here’s a more-thorough 5-minute video on this principle by Dave Young:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tip 2: Prevent Choice Paralysis

Too many choices results in buyers avoiding a decision and failing to convert.  You need to make it easy for a buyer to say yes without getting too bogged down in the details.  One way to do this is to provide a recommended or “best value” option.

But here’s where I’d go a bit beyond that by looking at this through the lens of temperament:

• Spontaneous temperaments like recommended and “most popular” options.  They also ver much want to shorten the time spent shopping and setting up so they can maximize time spent actually DOING THE THING.  If your recommended option helps customers get out on the playing field quicker, then be sure to tell visitors that.
• Methodical temperaments will want to know WHY you believe this is the best value and how you can prove it.  Show your reasoning/methodology in coming to your conclusions and offer up proof of value.  This may involve linking to a mouse-over or additional page from the recommendation box.  Maybe a little link on “Why we recommend this package.”
• Competitive temperaments don’t necessarily need a recommendation, but a quick way to narrow down their choices by advanced filtering.  Or a quick way of knowing why the choice you’ve labeled as premium will give them an edge.  Keep them in control and convinced they’re getting an advantage through their purchase and they’ll convert.
• Humanistic temperaments usually want to know how easy it is to upgrade or downgrade a recommended service or swap-out a product if your recommendation ends up not quite suiting them.  They also want a sense of your motivations in recommending one product over another and possibly if they can Chat or call someone about the recommendation.

Tip 3: Show The Product

This is very similar to my post on “Show me the pics.”  People want to see what they are buying.  Not only do the pictures answer questions, but people want to imagine using the product.

What I’d add to this is that one picture often isn’t enough and that action photos are gold.  For software and services that means not only offering product tours with lots of screenshots, but also in using scenario-based product tours rather than functionality-based tours.  Walk me through doing something rather than randomly showing this or that functionality.

Tip 4: Let People Try It

Great (and self-explanatory) advice, but I was glad that Show the Product came before this.  I’ve seen a fair amount of software companies believe that visitors would just leap at a free trial in order to experience a product first hand, and that just aint how it works.

Visitors invariably want to sniff a product out BEFORE downloading it and investing time with it.  Realize that “Free” doesn’t really equate to risk free.  Dmitry writes about the positive benefits users’ emotional “sunk costs” that come with using a free piece of software – the kind of thing that leads to a paid updgrade vs. a search for a whole new product.  What he doesn’t mention is that visitors are well aware of that sunk cost and will avoid downloading software unless and until they have a decent sense that it will work well for them.

So, yes, by all means, let people try the product for free.  Just make sure you show them enough of the product and what it can do that their willing to invest the time trying it out.

Tip 5 & 7: AIDA and Next Steps

I combined these because they are intimately related and are both areas Future Now has quite thoroughly covered.  We, of course, add the “S” of Satisfaction onto the end of Attention-Interest-Desire-Action.

Also, planning persuasive momentum/next action steps should be more involved than simply ensuring visitors can find a buy button when they’re ready to buy or that you have some additional link made available to them.

Finally, you gotta love this money quote from the article:

“…you shouldn’t design a nice website first and then fill up the space with words. Instead,think about the message you want to send out, write the copy and then construct a design that delivers that.”

Amen, brother.  Amen.

Tip 6: Guide Attention

Having just finished writing about the impact of design on visitor eye tracking, I naturally found this to be the best part of the article.  Lost of great stuff on intelligent use of design to guide the eyes/attention of the visitor.

As for additional resources on the Web, check out

The Elements of Design Applied to the Web

Good Call to Action Buttons

Making Tabs Work for You

Looks can Kill Design Effectiveness

Color, Contrast, and Dimension

and Rowland Wilson on Composition

Tip 8:  The Gutenberg Rule

I really don’t have too much to say about this one, other than it’s another rule of thumb for good composition/page layout and that you should go and take a look at it for yourself.

And that’s it.  I’d love to hear your comments, suggestions, and additional resources as well.  Let me know what ya think…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modeling Customer Psychology and Persuasive Online Copywriting

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

Once? Twice, maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely not, right?  Or at least not yet.

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

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

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

Task Orientation Defines Scent

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

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

But what about people just wanting to browse?

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

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

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

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

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

Early Stage Buying vs. True Browsing

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

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

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

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

Browsers are still task-oriented

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

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

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

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

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

What it takes to be a browsing-friendly Website

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

• Amazon
• Zappos
• iTunes

Here’s what they have in common:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversion Isn’t an Event, it’s a Process

We always like to focus first on increasing the number of leads towards the top of the sales funnel. However, without the next step, consumption, the companies don’t necessarily achieve their better but usually unstated goal of increased revenue.

This is the same fuzzy focus that has companies intent on getting more clicks to their PPC ads just so they can show the increased traffic numbers without focusing on converting that visitor into a lead or sale. To tell you the truth it is not as hard to get visitors to take the uncommitted step, as it is getting them to actually use and consume the product.

When you optimize for customer experience you really need to take the whole scenario from awareness (clicking your ad) through conversion and ultimately to consumption (and ideally to evangelism) into account.

An Example of Trying to Create Consumption

Yesterday I received this email from TimeBridge. I set up an account when I received an invitation from a friend at another company to setup a meeting. You know how challenging it is to coordinate a meeting amongst several people using email, etc.  Well I responded to his request and I really enjoyed the experience (partially because it was seamless using my Mac and Entourage) so I decided to setup an account. I even told several people about it. But I was never converted enough to incorporate it into my work flow.

I must have setup countless meetings since then all without the use of TimeBridge. What do you think went wrong? I converted, did a little worth of mouth for them but never consumed the product. Somehow the persuasive momentum was lost.

This is one way to try to initiate consumption. Use emails to try and prod engagement, add a bit of bribery (such as a contest for a $10 Starbucks card) and see how it works. We’ve seen several other really good examples over the years, what is the best method you have ever seen?

In fact, his last e-mail was so good and applied so well to most lead generation websites that I thought I’d share it with you directly:

“…Leach recruited the BIGGEST OFFENSIVE LINE in college football (bet it’s bigger than most pro teams as well). These guys make the offense that Leach runs possible. They wear down defensive lines, protect the passer, open up running lanes … but guess what … THEY DON’T SCORE. They only make it possible to score.

I think great websites similarly open up the door of possibility but no matter how big the website is … and how many bells and whistles it has … there is a lot more to scoring points with the customer.  You still need to do all the other things right.

Southwest Airlines is aggressive online. I print boarding passes through the website.  I get my seat assignments through the website. I also get regular email offers from them. Sounds hunky dory but the Website AIN’T the reason I am booking flights. It is the cost, convenience and great service Southwest has been delivering to ME for a long time. The WEB just made my ongoing relationship with them even easier.

Amazon isn’t just a website … they do an incredible job of shipping my books to my doorstep … and yep, they send me customized emails about new books on subjects I read.

UPS lets my company do all its shipping on line … but it is the guy in the brown truck who picks up my packages on the day I want to ship that I am interested in … the UPS website is merely a tool.

The same concept applies to your clients. The WEBSITE is an extension of the business … it ain’t the business. The Man-Giants for Texas Tech don’t score … they make it possible for Graham Harrel and Michael Crabtree (i.e., the SALES TEAM) to connect and put points on the board  … the defense is the OTHER stuff we do that people may not notice (like delivering really awesome service).

I think that more and more energy is being put into websites (the Offensive Line) … and it is vitally important … but you still have to have a sales force (QB & Receivers) and combine it with excellent core service & products (Defense). Put it all together and you can win a National Title.

t”

Yet while Tom was taking this from a somewhat negative light by asking “are your company’s QB/receivers up to snuff?”  I was taking this from the opposite perspective of, the better the offensive line blocks, the more successful the rest of your offense will become.

More specifically, clients with lead generation sites are always more than happy with the increased number of sales leads we can create through Website redesigns and optimization, but that’s not what the rave about.  What they’re usually blown away by is the increase in lead quality and reduction in sales cycle time.

Why?

Because most clients weren’t thinking about – and therefore weren’t expecting improvement in – that aspect of lead generation when they hired us, so success on that front is more of a WOW for them.  And also because those factors can be even more important in bottom line success than increasing the raw amount of leads.

Of course, when you really focus on the fact that the website itself won’t complete the sale, it becomes second nature to ensure the sales team gets the best possible hand-offs and the most protection from time-wasting tire kickers “sacking” your QB.

So if you already have a solid sales team, the question I’d ask you is: how good is your offensive line, and how much more could you be scoring with a better one?

“Leach is unusual in giving his quarterback the authority to change every play, wherever the line of scrimmage. “He can see more than I’ll ever see,” Leach says. ‘If I call a stupid play, his job is to get me out of it. If he doesn’t get me out of it, I might holler at him. But if you let him react to what he sees, there’s a ton of touchdowns to be had.’ All Leach is really saying to Hodges when he sends in the play is, ‘Line up in Ace, see how they line up against it and call a good play…’

The Texas Tech offense is not just an offense; it’s a mood: optimism. It is designed to maximize the possibility of something good happening rather than to minimize the possibility of something bad happening…”

Unfortunately, most optimization consultants take the opposite mindset from that attributed to the Texas Tech Football Program’s by Michael Lewis in his NYT article I’ve been quoting from in this series of posts.  In short, most Web consultants focus their efforts on minimizing the possibility of something bad happening (of loosing an already convinced customer’s sale) by fixing usability flaws.

Yet if you want to move beyond page-level optimization, you’ll have to begin maximizing the possibility of something good happening – of convincing visitors to convert who may not already be convinced when they arrive.  And you do this by planning visitor interactions on a click-by-click basis, imagining:

• What questions will arise in their minds,
• What tasks they’re looking to accomplish,
• What expectations they had when they clicked the previous link
• What doubts and concerns are keeping them from moving forward

You’ll find that real scoring opportunities most frequently involve:

• Increasing the match-up between visitor click-through expectations and your content, as well as the match-up between their buying tasks and your selling objectives, and
• Adding content or hyperlinks to answer key questions and provide missing substantiation

Both of which are a far cry from simply tweaking buttons and testing navigation schemes.  And both of which require you to go beyond mechanically applying best practices or ‘mindlessly’ running A/B tests.

This kind of optimization requires that you see how visitor behavior lines up against the backdrop of your current content and then to choose a change/test based on your best hypothesis of why visitors are doing what they’re doing instead of what you want them to do.  Kind of like the Texas Tech QB calling a play based on the mismatch between the formation and the defensive response.

Here’s an actual example from LuLu.com*, specifically their page on softcover publishing:

Now, let’s say LuLu’s three desired actions on this page are, in order of priority:

1. Click the “Self-publish” button in the active window
2. Click the “Lulu Demo” button to the right of the tabs
3. Use the “cost calculator” tool located down below the fold

And just so you can see that cost calculator portion of the page, it looks like this:

Now, let’s imagine that the Web analytics are telling you that the majority of traffic is going to:

• The “Services” page as accessed by the top tab
• The Home Page (either from the back button) or main “Publish” page
• “Help” or “FAQs” either from the top tab or Footer Nav Links

And we’ll also imagine that very few page visitors are taking the actions we want.  Plus, those that are clicking on the “Self Publish” button are quickly closing out of the “upload/cart” – they’ve just got a huge abandonment rate.

Step 1: Take your best guess at what’s going on.

First, I’d imagine visitors coming here from the homepage, the Publish page, and maybe even directly from organic and paid search. And that means most of them aren’t quite ready to upload their manuscript just yet – they probably still have some questions.

Given that situation, the current label for the main call-to-action – the “Self Publish” button – will probably feel deceptive to the visitor.  They’ll likely think the button links to a demo or to more info, and then they’re taken to an upload page.  Is it any wonder they rapidly back out of the upload interface?  Do you see how the context of the click/hyperlink on the prior page can dramatically affect the performance of the current page?

I’d also guess that people aren’t seeing the real demo button because it’s outside the active window.  Plus, the page utterly fails to answer questions about the relative pricing, merits, and limitations of LuLu’s paper, book size, and binding options.  So instead of moving forward, visitors are moving backwards to the publish and home pages and navigating to Help and FAQ pages to try to find those answers/information.

Step 2: Test your hypotheses

I’d test an alternative main button label of “Start by uploading your manuscript for free” and I’d put some Point of Action Assurances near the button.  Something like, “No commitment to upload & you retain the copyright.”

This ought to better prepare visitors for where that button will take them, and it will better appeal to spontaneous shoppers, who are most likely to click that kind of call to action.

I’d also test moving the demo button down into the banner area, not too far from the “Upload” button.  This will make it more visually prominent and should grab some of the traffic now going to the “Services,” “Help,” and “FAQ” pages.  Plus I’d make sure the demo ends with a link to bring visitors back to this page; remember, we want to maximize the chances they’ll come back and convert!

Finally, I’d add copy next to the pictures of “Perfect Bound,” “Saddle Stitched,” and “Coil Bound” pictures, as well as creating some “How to publish as economically as possible” bullets next to the cost calculator so visitors don’t have to blindly guess at what size paperbacks are more expensive, what trade-offs are involved in using cheaper paper, etc.

Step 3: Get it done and learn from the test results

Here’s where a lot of companies get stuck.  They get the test ideas queued up and then they don’t get the new buttons or banners or pictures designed.  Or they don’t write the copy, or some such.  A week to a week and a half goes by so that they’re just starting the test by the time they should have actionable results.

At any rate, not every test goes the way you plan, obviously.  But here’s the beauty of testing this way: if relabeling the “Upload” button doesn’t have any success, but the other tests DO increase the time on the page, the use of the cost calculator, and the number of people watching the demo, maybe you need to test a special, “Upload Your Manuscript” landing page, with new assurances and upload info, giving visitors timelines, points of contact, etc.

Believe me, those kind of results aren’t a failure – they’re a first down!  Now you just have to keep driving toward the goal with follow-up tests.  And the cumulative results of this kind of testing creating the kind of customer insight for breakaway success.

So how can you jump-start this process?

Well, in the spirit of the Raider’s fast-tempo offense, I’m offering a fast-turnaround Web Optimization service, emphasizing do-able, quick-to-implement changes capable of driving real world touchdowns:

The 48-hour, $500 e-mail/ad campaign and landing page analysis

If you’re planning or in the middle of a campaign and want to optimize your results, I can personally analyze your e-mail, ad, etc along with the campaign’s intended landing page and provide you with insight-oriented and easily implemented tests/changes for driving results – just like the kind you saw with LuLu.com.

Better yet, I’ll provide you with an interpretation of the actual results – what to look for, how to make sense of what you’re seeing – and follow-on actions.  If we score a game-winning touchdown and you like the feel of that, you can sign-on for ongoing optimization with Future Now.

If you only walk away with additional insight and a better understanding of how to implement your own optimization efforts – hey, that’s more than worth it for $500 and 48 hours. If you’re interested, contact us.

* Note that LuLu.com is not a client and I have not seen their analytics.  Everything about this example is hypothetical.

And Tom isn’t alone in considering Michael Lewis’s sports writing to be a hidden treasure; just look at this marketing-based analysis of his book,  Money Ball.  But Tom Peters has been alone in recognizing the business applications of Michael Lewis’s astonishing article on the surprising innovation and success of Texas Tech Football, written no less than three years ago.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Action & Tempo:

“…[Coach Leach] had been harping on tempo all week: he thinks the team that wins is the team that moves fastest, and the team that moves fastest is the team that wants to. He believes that both failure and success slow players down, unless they will themselves not to slow down. ‘When they fail, they become frustrated,’ he says. ‘When they have success, they want to become the thinking-man’s football team. They start having these quilting bees, these little bridge parties at the line of scrimmage.’”

You have to learn by implementing, and it’s incredibly advantageous if you work hard to keep your testing tempo as fast and continuous as possible.  Theory and intuition are great at helping you figure out what to test, what to look for in your analytics, and how to interpret your data, but untested assumptions can kill you.  If you think that customers would respond well to X, figure out an easy-to-implement test to confirm or disprove that.  The last thing you want to do is let your website sit static for months while you plan a major change based off of faulty assumptions about the market and/or customer motivations.

Plus, even if you have a brilliant plan to improve your website, it won’t help you until you’ve actually implemented the changes.  So a fast cycle of smaller tests and changes not only keeps you safer by verifying assumptions and improving learning, but successful tests implemented early can pay off during the time you would have wasted staging a larger “batch” of changes.

In a similar manner, Texas Tech is well aware of the “opportunity costs” involved in not keeping their offensive op-tempo as high as possible:

“An idea about the use of football time was being challenged. The typical football offense seeks to eat up as much of it as it can. The Texas Tech offense, which at that point in the season had passed for more touchdowns than any team in the country, uses just a shade over two minutes on each drive. But speeding everything up has a curious effect on game time. A typical college football team runs 65 to 75 offensive plays a game. Texas Tech tries to run 90 – and sometimes does. A college team with a robust passing game might throw the football 35 times a game; at this point, 8 games into an 11-game regular season, the Red Raiders were averaging 53 passes a game.”

Preferring batch implementation of changes and tests is kind of luck holding onto the football to control the clock – you’re wasting opportunities to move the ball down the field and score.  Yet most companies, like most traditional football offensive teams, don’t have Texas Tech’s sense of urgency; they don’t understand the often substantial opportunity costs involved.  Here’s a real life example:

I presented a client with a lead generation website for a considered purchase with a Persuasive Scenario Analysis towards the end of August.   As part of that report, I also presented a prioritized list of “most likely to generate dramatic improvement” changes/tests.  And among those suggested tests, I predicted that the easiest to implement change that was also most likely to produce immediate results was to prominently display the company’s phone number within their banner.

About 1.5 weeks ago they finally made that change (along with several others) and went from getting 0 calls from their website each week to 20 calls in the first full week they had stats for the revised website.  One of those 20 calls converted into a sale.  Most sales average in at $20,000 to $30,000.

Now, I’m hesitant to put too much weight on only one week’s worth of results, but even conservatively downgrading those figures still results in a significant opportunity cost for NOT implementing that change right away.

Orientation

“Leach made his way to the sideline and from his back pocket pulled a crumpled piece of paper with the notations for dozens of plays typed on it, along with a red pen. When a play doesn’t work, he puts an X next to it. When a play works well, he draws a circle beside it – “to remind myself to run it again.” But at the start of a game, he’s unsure what’s going to work…

The Red Raiders trotted off the field at halftime with a lead, but not a large one: 14-10. A disappointing half, yet with hidden value. For 40 plays Leach’s offense had groped – digressing, probing to learn something new – and it had been useful to see how the empty spaces on the field shifted. Coach and quarterback now knew what they wanted to know about the A.&M. defense.  They had paid for the knowledge with time, but time means less to them than it does to any other offense in the land. A half to the Texas Tech offense is as good as a full game to most. The game within the game was about to begin…

In the five full years Leach has coached Texas Tech, four or five times each season the team has flopped around ineffectually for the first third or so of a game before racing off to score touchdowns at a rate unheard of in organized tackle football. It’s as if his opponent’s defense has some deep dark secret that takes time for his offense to extract.”

Action isn’t good enough if you’re just throwing stuff against the wall and not learning from it by reinforcing your successes and killing your failures.  Coach Leach doesn’t just know that this play worked and this play didn’t, he also seeks to understand why, so that he and his quarterback can adjust their overall strategy accordingly.  Once the Raiders have correctly sized up their opponents, that’s when the real scoring opportunities begin to appear.  Here’s what that looks like in the game Michael Lewis was describing:

“Leach had just a few minutes with Hodges, but he told him what he had noticed. First, the A.&M. cornerbacks were disguising their intentions. They were lining up as if to cover the fade routes – that is, before the play began, they stood between the receiver and the sidelines – but then, just as the ball was snapped, they were scampering back into the middle of the field. To Hodges it looked as if fade routes would be covered, so he had been sending his receivers on slants into the middle of the field. ‘Throw the fade,’ Leach said. ‘It doesn’t look like it’s there, but it is.’

The other glaring opportunity, to Leach’s mind, was A.&M.’s response to Tech’s formations. On the few occasions when Texas Tech lined up in a formation that suggested a running play, with two running backs, the Aggies ’put their ears back and stop the run.’ But when Tech was, as it preferred, in its passing formation, A.&M.’s fear of the pass caused them to leave huge empty spaces to run in. In the second half, the Tech running backs would be charging into pass coverage, and the Tech receivers would be running toward the sidelines.

There was one other thing Leach had noticed – and Hodges had noticed it, too. The A.&M. front line appeared tired. ‘The minute you see the defensive line bent over and their hands on their hips,’ Hodges told me, ‘that’s when you know you have them.’ The A.&M. linemen were a lot bigger than the Texas Tech linemen. They may or may not have been fatter – Leach insists they were – but their bodies were clearly designed for a different sort of football game than this frenetic one. ‘That’s the risk of playing 330-pound guys,’ Leach said later. ‘You get good push, but if you got to run around a lot, you get tired.’”

The problem with most companies is that even when they do run A/B and multivariate tests, they’re often just testing random variables or best practices, which means they have no basis for interpreting the results in terms of a larger ‘game strategy.’ If you only know that headline “A” outperformed headline “B” without understanding WHY headline “A” worked best, it would be like Coach Leach only knowing that play X worked and play Y didn’t without seeing the larger patterns or flaws in his opponents defense and without being able to exploit that during the second half.

Here’s a practical web example of this principle taken from Microsoft’s Experimentation Platform blog.  The post in question features three separate A/B tests and the second test of two different site search bars is a perfect example of how the WHY is so crucial.  But first, here are the two search bar designs:

Which one worked better?  Neither: the results were statistically negligible.  Now, if that’s all that you took away from that test, you’d have lost out.  But if you started the tests with some hypothesis about why one design might work better, you could follow up with goal scoring, revised search bar.

For instance, most people would find the search area of Option A much more inviting because it’s more spacious.  Plus, the “Popular Searches” is labeled as such in Option A whereas it’s something of a disconcerting mystery in Option B.

On the other hand, Option B does one very important thing right, that Option A doesn’t: it labels with strong verbs!  Rather than guessing that the magnifying glass means “search,” I can look at the big green button and instantly know that clicking on it will start my search.  That one is kind of a no-brainer, actually, especially since Steve Krug has rather famously taught that search buttons should either say “Search” or “Go.”

If you started with those assumptions, you might have actually created an Option C that combined the best elements of both features.  Something like this:

And then I’d be willing to bet rather heavily that you’d come up with a very clear winner. But if you simply threw Options A and B up in a simple split test and accepted the results without thinking about them, you’d never get to an improved search bar.

So how can you more consistently move past a “best practices” or a “let’s test everything” approach to Website optimization?  What kind of methodology will let you advance beyond page-level optimization to Website-wide conversion improvement?

Well, while that subject definitely builds on what we’ve just discussed, it’s also worthy of a post in itself, so make sure to subscribe to get Part II as soon as it comes out.

One thing jumped right out: Across the board, the percentage of those surveyed who had negative things to say about shopping online was higher among older shoppers, with one exception. Can you guess?

“Online shopping is still too complicated.” Unbelievable, huh? But it’s a sentiment evidently shared by 18 year olds and 65+ year olds equally.

To me, this just shows the opportunity that still exists in the e-commerce space. The burden is really up to us as marketers to understand who our visitors are and what they what to see in order to be comfortable purchasing. It’s a challenge that keeps me passionate about this space and I hope motivates you.

It’s not that we don’t like Flash. When used purposefully, Flash has the potential to dramatize a product or service’s benefits in ways that static pictures and text can’t quite match.

The micro-site for the Sigma DP-1 camera (choose language preference to start) is a good example of Flash done right.

Notice how the choreographed presentation of text and pictures dramatizes the benefit of having a DSLR image sensor in a compact camera body. And notice how the site’s designers capture your attention from the beginning of the presentation and lead you to a place where you can then interact with the camera’s features.

Sigma’s Flash presentation creates persuasive momentum, then leverages it by bringing viewers to an interactive website where they can drill down into specifics.

For an example of Flash used within a website — rather than as an introduction to a website — I recommend taking a look at this page from the Leo Diamond website. No, it’s not the prettiest site out there, but the Flash tools provide visitors with a better feel for diamond carat size and color than either text or static pictures could. And it works.

Flash can be an effective tool when used intelligently and sparingly. But before you decide on using it, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What will this allow me to convey that text and static images wouldn’t?

2. Am I actually conveying benefits or just adding sparkle and glitz?

3. Is there a way to make this more interactive and not just a push-presentation?

4. If I can’t make it interactive, what can I do to hook the viewer right from the start, so they don’t skip the presentation? (You ARE going to provide a “skip” option, right?)

5. What pathways am I providing to the flash viewer when they are done with the interactive tool or presentation?

6. Are there clear links and pathways forward that will lead to conversion?

7. Will the static content allow visitors to drill down into the topics most important to them?

8. Does it address the visitor’s true concerns?

9. Will you capitalize on the persuasive momentum from the Flash presentation?

10. Do your calls to action continue to build on that momentum?

If you can answer those questions, it might be smart to use Flash sparingly.

. .

About the Author: Jeff Sexton is a Persuasion Architect, and on June 2nd, he’ll be taking the day off from helping clients fuse style and substance to teach FutureNow’s Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar in Manhattan.

I originally read the article because it talks about gender and website design. But there’s much more to it than the title (”Website Marketing Across Genders”) suggests. For instance, the phenomenon he calls “Towards” and “AwayFrom” advertising.

I’ll dig into that in another post, but in the meantime, take a look at his description of using a visual on a page to draw visitors toward a specific action:

Let me give you an example of an automotive retailer site that also works in print. The goal is to have the visitor purchase a new vehicle. Place an image in the upper part of the screen or print piece. The left of the image is the owned vehicle, the right of the image is the desired or target vehicle. Just right of center is the couple or an individual facing the desired vehicle and walking towards it.

The web’s media capabilities allow the message to get across very well because the couple or individual can be seen actually moving towards the target vehicle. In a static image that implies walking have the right hand swinging towards the target vehicle, the left hand swinging towards the owned vehicle.

So simple. So powerful.

Speaking of simple and powerful, if you haven’t read Bryan Eisenberg’s award-winning article on website images and eyetracking, you should. It definitely clarifies Joseph’s point.

Banner ads, once clicked, usually evoke the confusion of Alice’s rabbit hole more than the come-what-may optimism of Forrest’s box of chocolates — either way, you don’t know what to expect.

Grabbing attention is tough, and most of us are jaded from past letdowns. So, to work, a banner campaign must direct traffic, showing visitors what they’ll get and why they’ll want it.

Who You Lookin’ At?

One way to get attention is by showing models. TracFone is an example of a company that puts on a human face (albeit a scowling one). Let’s take a look at one of their banners to see how they might improve conversion…

The Valentine’s Day motif grabs attention, as do the girls’ faces, which seem to be looking straight at you. But eye-tracking studies show that we’re drawn to models’ eyes. We end up mesmerized, ignoring the critical parts of the ad.

The folks at TracFone should read Bryan’s post, “How a Pretty Face Can Push Visitors Away.”

Since our attention stays on the faces and eyes, TracFone’s benefits are lost in the background. The all-caps name “XOXOFONE” frames the faces, further keeping the eyes on the upper left-hand side. A simple change in the direction of the eyes to the lower-right side of the ad would direct visitors to the call to action and company logo. (Besides, it might make these girls look like they’re not going to yell at the first guy who invites them to Prom via TracFone.)

Oh, No They Di’int…

From the banner ad, visitors are sent to this busy landing page:

Tracfone presents big, bright red hearts as a marker to connect the visitor. Yet they fail to build persuasive momentum. At this critical stage, the visitor isn’t brought deeper into the buying process. Instead of continuing the scent trail [define] of information, TracFone introduces new information and visuals that create a disconnect with the banner ad it was designed to support.

If TracFone were a Future Now client, here are a few things we’d have them test:

1. Don’t Look at Me! — When using models, make sure the eyes aren’t the focal point. Use an image that directs the visitors’ eyes toward the call to action. Let the copy drive the click.

2. Buy When? — Don’t propose marriage on the first date. There’s almost never enough info on a banner ad to convince someone they should actually “buy now.” Try flirting instead.

3. Consistency is Key — Build on the information and images on the landing page. Help would-be customers make the connection. People will quickly lose momentum to move forward if you present different prices, copy and images than they saw in the ad.

[Editor's Note: Tired of one-click stands? Sick of hiring gold-diggers who don't return the investment? Bring home a conversion analysis your CFO would approve of.]

If so, maybe there’s good reason for that. Maybe it does (sound like a broken record).

Your company’s website is always on. It’s always there, speaking on your behalf. And it can get old quickly. Sometimes, it’s best to play it cool. Be yourself. Don’t try to pick up every customer you meet. If you want to attract someone unique, define what it is that you’re not. But, whatever you do, don’t be pushy; it’s the ultimate turn-off. The rules of attraction aren’t much different if you’re selling soap or not-buying love.

The Hard Sell

[RSS readers, click here for video.]

When’s the last time you had a Kraft Caramel? Did you chew it, or did you just sort of gum it down? This commercial is kind of cute in retrospect, but it’s a prime example of why we should all be thankful that the mass market era is gone, gone, gone, gone, yeah. You don’t have to be Pavlov’s cat to know this won’t work today.

The No Value Proposition Hard Sell (Retro Edition)

[RSS readers, click here for video.]

Head On introduced itself to the public without saying anything but its name, over, and over, and over, and over, and… (Arrrrrggghhh!!! What were they thinking!!?? It’s like listening to “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” performed by a choir of chainsaw-wielding parrots.) The only thing this commercial does to sell its product is actually give me the headache it implicitly claims to cure. And despite the fact that dissecting their marketing logic just gave me another headache, I still refuse to buy the stuff. This would’ve been a bad commercial in the 50’s. Today, there’s simply no excuse to disrupt the intrigue continuum.

Repetition as Humor

[RSS readers, click here for video.]

In the 80’s, brands were still tinkering around with tried-and-true mass marketing tactics. York does a good job here of using mind-numbing repetition to make you laugh at their own brand. York is fun. It’s a peppermint patty — what’s not to love? And it works. The melodrama of it all makes the ad ridiculous enough to stick; you shake your head and smile at the same time. Still, the begging for attention thing is a bit much. (Isn’t it annoying when cute people act this way? You’re cute. We get it. Enough, already.) For me, this ad evokes fond memories, not of the Alps, but of boring auto body shop waiting rooms and greasy glass counter tops next to diner cash registers; the usual places one falls in love with a York.

Want to be a marketing pick-up artist? Brand Autopsy has some tips on how to freshen up your online marketing game.

But first, a little background…

One of our seminar attendees helped us notice something interesting about “Corporate DNA”. Something wasn’t “write” with her company’s messaging. They’re large, well-known, and have spent decades projecting themselves as a Humanistic culture, with massive, ongoing radio and TV ad campaigns. So, the first thing we noticed on their website was that the copywriting was tailored for Methodical types. (To read more about how we classify personality types into Competitive, Spontaneous, Methodical, and Humanistic, click here.)

Where did this disconnect come from? Were they really a Methodical company, after all? According to our guest, they were. OK, then why not just say so in the TV and radio ads? It’s a bit jarring to have one impression of a brand through its multi-channel advertising, only to go to their website and find it’s something completely different. This is the friction that causes customers to bail. Customers want a consistent relationship and tone from their brands, whatever the channel may be.

When I came across this banner on Technorati this past week, I was intrigued:

Step #1 — The Banner / Advertising Campaign

Since we’d been talking about how to create messages that appeal to different personality types, I thought it would be a good idea to see what my team had to say about the experience Geico created from banner ad, to landing page, to getting an insurance quote.

Over email, I asked my fellow Future Now consultants what they thought about the campaign:

1. The banner appeals to which personality type(s)?

“The fast-paced types; Spontaneous first, then Competitive.” –Cinde Johnson

2. Would the brand itself cause other personality types to click through anyway?

“Geico is a brand that’s known and trusted. People who recognize that it’s a Geico ad, and have a positive association with them, will likely click.” –Dan McGuigan

“Humanistics will like the friendliness of the gecko from other ads they may have seen/heard, and the cup of tea makes it a bit more personal, more human. A Methodical, on the other hand… I’m not so sure. There’s not a lot for a Methodical to go with in the banner, except that it says that it’s ‘easy’. But they’re generally too deliberate to be moved by branding alone.” –Cinde Johnson

3. How does this banner connect with their brand, and your expectations of it?

“The little lizard with the Aussie accent (using “mate” in the messaging) helps us connect with a brand we already know. Their branding has always expressed how Geico makes it ‘easy.’ so this is continuing that perception.

“The problem is I forgot what they did; I just knew they made it easy! Although I like the banner, and it probably connects well with the other marketing communication spots that they have out there, I actually don’t know anything about Geico besides seeing this lizard on ads — and that he’s got an accent. I’m probably not the typical American, but I actually forgot what they did.” –Melissa Burdon

“Geico positions itself as the easy way to save money on insurance in 15 minutes, so this ad does reinforce their branding.” –Ron Patiro

4. What’s your overall impression of the banner?

“Not bad. I’d say a solid B.” –Anthony Garcia”

“One of the only times I’ve seen ‘click here’ work in a Call to Action. People can’t say it, but well-branded talking geckos can.” –Ron Patiro

“If I just saw this banner ad, and didn’t know they offer insurance, I wouldn’t be enticed to click. Even changing it to ‘Geico makes insurance easy,’ would have cleared that one up for me. They need to be thinking of the different stages of the buying process as well.” –Melissa Burdon

Step #2 — The Campaign’s Landing Page

I am glad Geico continued the scent from banner and landing page by reinforcing and repeating the logo, the imagery, and copy tone. Remember, our friend the talking gecko has promised us it would be easy. But once I clicked through, I had even more expectations.

Here’s what they had to say about the landing page:

5. Does the landing page reinforce the banner’s message?

“If one were to ‘think’ about the connection — which most people don’t do consciously — they would see that ‘Would you like cream…” does inject a message of how easy Geico makes getting a quote or rate.” –Peter Lee

“I didn’t notice the little mug and tea bag in the banner. I actually wondered what was in the lizard’s hand, but, when I clicked, I noticed the mug. Instead of just telling me Geico can save me money, they specify they could save me ‘hundreds,’ so I have a better idea of what we’re talking about. ‘Would you like cream or sugar with that?’ tells me it’s a commodity; something we need in our everyday lives. We treat ourselves well without Starbucks, so how are we treating ourselves with insurance? We could also be saving some money on insurance to put toward our coffee fund!

“I’m going off on a tangent, but there are quite a few messages that could be taken out of this add.” –Melissa Burdon

6. Would you do anything to improve this page?

“They might want to provide a bit more information for Methodical types. People often switch to a methodical choice when shopping for something like insurance.” –Mal Watlington

“The ‘continue’ button gives me no sense of what I get if I enter this information. What’s the payoff? How much more information am I going to have to give you? My inner Methodical side isn’t happy at all.” –Holly Buchanan

Be prepared. Geico chose the the word “just” fill in your zip code. That word has meaning. As in there is really nothing much more to this than “just” filling in your zip code.

Finally, let’s see what happens when we click through to get an insurance quote…

Step #3 — A Disconnected Form Process

When a Spontaneous type lands on this page, one of the first things that stand out is the big “0% Complete” in the progress indicator. They don’t jump right to the form. Instead, their eyes scan the progress indicator, thanks to the disconnect between the first landing page/banner and the green “0%” — and everything else on the form.

Here are their impressions of this crucial third step:

7. What would the personality type(s) you chose — the ones driven by the banner — think of this first step in the quote process?

“I’ve already given you my zip code. You mean, there’s a lot more to getting this quote!? This isn’t easy.” “You said this would be easy, but I’m not sure this is going to be easy.” “Why do you need my name and phone number to give me a quote?” “Wow–six pages of forms to complete to get a quote! This is easy?” (”Where’s my little gecko buddy and his little cup of tea?”) –Cinde Johnson

“Then complete disconnect. I hit a page with a completely different design, asking for lots of information. I’m looking for the lizard, but instead I see the typical white chick, offering help. I don’t want to talk to the white chick. I want to talk to the lizard.” –Holly Buchanan

8. What would you do differently to appeal to each of the personality types on this page?

The primary persona driven by the ad, the Spontaneous, most likely never spent the time filling out a long form like this – they just don’t have the time. They might call, but like everyone else in the world, the would never admit they “need help.” What if they had the Gecko right there and in his tone said something like, “If filling it out ain’t easy, call me.”

“The Competitive is going to think “OK, you said you can save me money, but now you’re asking for information, and there’s nothing to tell me how much more you’ll need or how filling out this form is going to accomplish that goal. All I see is “continue” (really weak Call to Action). What’s the benefit in continuing?

“The Humanistic, like me, is going to feel like “I want to talk to the lizard, not that white chick. What happened to my milk and sugar? You went from warm and fuzzy to cold and impersonal. You just lost that wonderful rapport you worked so hard to establish.

“The Methodical is going to think (since they don’t feel) “How many steps are involved? You don’t indicate the exact number of steps involved in this process. What is this process? Exactly what information do you require? How long will this take? How will you use this information to save me money? Will I be here for a minute, or two hours? I can’t plan ahead because you give me no way to understand the process, how long it takes, or what the process even is. And what’s with that annoying icon with a foreign accent about, anyway? My 3 year-old daughter thinks it’s cute. Want to sell car insurance to 3 year-olds, do you? Great. Want to sell car insurance to me? Get a life.” –Holly Buchanan

The Brand & Landing Page Campaign Challenge:

Perhaps it’s not so easy…

Please let us know what you think of the Geico brand, its ad campaigns, and its landing pages. How would you answer the above questions?

Is creating the right brand and landing page experiences so “easy” a caveman, of any personality, could do it? What will you do to insure your brand and landing pages connect with customers? Let us know if you need help.

Recorded Webinar: “7 Simple Ways to Boost Your Holiday Conversion Rate” (From September 12, 2007)

About: Elastic Path Software presents “7 Simple Ways to Boost Your Holiday Conversion Rate.”

Your ecommerce bucket is about to be filled with tons of eager holiday shoppers, ready and willing to buy. Plugging your conversion rate leaks now will maximize your holiday success. We will show you 7 simple ways to lift your conversion rate that do not require a ton of effort to implement, yet deliver big results. Register to attend and find out how to make your holiday sales sing a merry tune.

Future Now Persuasion Analyst Melissa Burdon and Elastic Path Software VP of Innovation Jason Billingsley will be your panelists. As always, bring your questions and our experts will address them during the live Q&A session.

Watch it now: Click Here

I’m always thrilled when additional evidence surfaces.

The majority of abandonment issues can be fixed if you focus on answering visitors’ questions earlier in the “funnel” or purchase consideration process. Persuasion Architecture™ (define) is designed to anticipate the questions people have and facilitate the momentum required for them to accomplish their goals.

We’ve been solving this problem reliably for years. Do you still have a form abandonment problem?

All too often, companies get so hung up on optimizing their sites to convert late-stage, ready-to-buy customers that they don’t realize that creating the most relevant experience is really what helps them in the long term. For instance, I may end up buying the cheapest car insurance I can find, but I’d prefer to do business with a company that’s transparent about teen driving coverage and expenses. I’m not ready to buy today, but that’s fine. Soon enough, I will.

So, for the next few minutes, see what happens as I browse Geico.com, StateFarm.com, and Progressive.com in this early-stage buying scenario:

(For those reading this in RSS, click here for the video.)

As always, we hope to hear more suggestions on websites to cover. We’ll do our best to insure it’s something each of us can walk away with.

We’d love to hear some comments from parents or anyone who’s bought car insurance online. Oh, and don’t be afraid to steal this video. Just stay away from my daughter’s car.

Vince’s painting has affected millions. It’s one of the best known images in modern culture. It’s inspired songs such as Don McLean’s “Starry Starry Night” and is one of the most replicated prints. The painting has a magnetic appeal, engaging the reader by drawing them into its world.

I say “reader” rather than viewer because this image is a perfect example of how an image SPEAKS a thousand words in an instant, emotional impact.

In the past decade, the online marketing industry has been known to echo the phrase “Content is king”. Great content — and equally good layout — is key to helping your visitors successfully find what they’re looking for. The content that’s king to search engines is the copy on a website, but the content that’s king to visitors is a balanced mixture of copy and images.

The images on a site help to create a face for the organization. The emotional visitor is engaged by pictures of friendly employees and clients. Logical visitors, meanwhile, look for images of competent executives — sorry, but handshake clip art won’t do — as well as product images that clearly describe every feature, using different angles and environments.

As a professional model, I get to see how my image is used to promote and communicate their products. As an online conversion and persuasion analyst, I see how clients use words and images to communicate their products and services. Too often, clients are missing some of Van Gogh’s magic brew that could radically improve their conversion results.

As website visitors become more exposed and sophisticated, they become more demanding. This means you’d better have ALL your words and images working in sync to persuade your visitors that they are in the right place.

The images most websites feature aren’t magnetic and powerful; they don’t speak to the visitor. Ask yourself what your images are saying and if they’re saying the right things. Are you conveying the “feel” of your company and products so the visitor really knows what they’ll experience when they buy from you?

First, a little background.

In Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, Jeff & Bryan Eisenberg compare traditional, mass media advertising methods (i.e., “push” marketing) to Persuasion Architecture’s use of “pull” marketing. With repetition — and a marginally effective message — ads were once able to create an association in the audience’s minds between…

a) a particular need or want, and;
b) the product’s ability to satisfy that need or want.

They did this using the exact same mechanism Pavlov tapped into when he created an association in the mind of his dogs between the ring of a bell and the serving of food. Done correctly, this type of advertising can reach prospective customers before they’re in the market for your product or service, causing them — once they finally have a need for what you sell — to think of you first and feel good about their decision.

It’s called branding, and it works. But the problems with branding in today’s world are many.

First of all, mass media is an illusion. Thanks to a fragmented media landscape — narrowcasting, long-tails, etc. — most companies don’t have the budget to reach enough people with enough repetition to make branding an efficient option. Secondly, people are using technology to screen out ads that are pushed at them. Because they can, audiences (understandably) don’t wish to be interrupted and now have the means to prevent the interruptions altogether.

Pull marketing, on the other hand, capitalizes on an audience’s existing desire for a product or service and creates a strong enough scent trail (define) to “pull” the customer through her buying process. You don’t have to work to plant an associative memory in the mind of the dog between the scent of raw meat and the satisfaction of his hunger. It’s already there; you just have to make sure the dog can follow the scent all the way to the food.

When buying process is satisfying, it’s often repeated. Repeated satisfaction (not repeated ads) creates brand affinity. This aspect of pull marketing eliminates much of the requirement to repeat an advertising message or to try to “break through the clutter” of ads being pushed at people. You’re going with the flow of a prospects attention and desires rather than trying to commandeer it.

The challenge of pull marketing is to correctly presume, and match, customer intent. What are people really intending to do when they search on this or that term? How do your prospective customers think about and describe their problems? if you misinterpret intent, the rest of your efforts at creating relevant scent trails will be in vain.

Pull marketing won’t reach potential customers before they’re in the market for your what your brand offers. If they’re not aware they need, or will need, what you sell, they won’t search for you — and they’ll be unlikely to pick up on your scent trail. Of course, loads of repeatedly satisfied customers have been known to create word-of-mouth that reaches more people, but the question remains: How do you engage prospects — no, that’s not an oxymoron — in an age when push advertising has become prohibitively expensive?

Let’s get back to the NY Times article and problem with sites like VeryFunnyAds.com:

1) Viewer Intent.

Visitors to these sites come there with the intention of finding entertaining ads. They’re looking for jokes. That’s the itch they’re trying to scratch. They’re clearly not coming there from an interest in the products being advertised. So, pull marketing is out, as is any meaningful attempt at conversion.

But, hey, at least they’re watching the ads, right? You’ve now got their attention and you’re not paying painfully high media rates to get it. How about these platforms as a vehicle for push marketing?

2) Repetition.

First, even before mentioning repetition, let’s talk about relevance. Funny/entertaining ads are only useful when the humor is integral to the brand’s Unique Value Proposition (more on UVP here). If humor is an effective way to convey the brand’s benefits, the viewer remembers the product’s promise. But if the humor strictly gratuitous, or only tangentially relevant, it usually falls flat. And when that happens, listen closely. That’s not the cash register in the background; it’s the sound of crickets and tumbleweed.

How many times will they need to see your ad before they feel the product will satisfy their need? Compare that answer to the amount of times you — or anyone — is likely to watch the same video at VeryFunnyAds.com. Two times? Three?

Does anyone need to tell you that’s not enough? Basically, you’d need an entire campaign of funny ads in order to get enough repetition for this “pull” attempt at branding to work properly. This can be done, but it’s a tall order. For instance, I loved this ad, but it fell flat with different personality types.

So, over on my Marketing to Women Online blog, I’m focusing on a real life small business owner and her website to illustrate some of the most common mistakes. We’re starting by looking at her homepage, and simple changes she can make to make it more effective. The piece specifically showcases websites targeting women, but you’ll find these homepage tips will work no matter whom you’re targeting.

Hey, even Tiger Woods has to go back and practice the basics!

I have an old friend who is a twirler. Mostly pencils, but I’ve seen him twirl knives, forks, plates, food, even sofa cushions. He’s the kind of guy who would walk across a college campus twirling a textbook on his knuckles. Manipulating poker chips is certainly a related skill.

I’ve always felt that twirlers and the poker chip twiddlers were sending the same message: “I’ve been doing this for a long time, and I’m good at it.” The chip shuffling may intimidate other poker players. The pencil twirling just draws the attention of the rest of the people sitting around the conference table.

Most of us are twirl challenged. I never learned to twirl. I quit trying after about age 23. I don’t play poker, so chip juggling is not a skill set for me either. (Maybe I should take up Twitter.) My observation is that these people twirl things because they can.

So, what’s my point?

Take a look at the execution of your navigational elements on your web site. Are they twirling? I mean, are they distracting, or do they convey helpful information without forcing some kind of hovering activity on my end? Are the relevant sub-nav links visible?

Apple does a good job with their tab structure and grouping. Amazon even customizes the tabs if you’re signed in. It’s nice and it’s contextual. On the other end of the spectrum, here’s a site that uses some fancy stuff PLUS sound! It’s hard to read the tabs when you’re having so much fun strumming the menu like a musical instrument. It gets in the way of the visitor’s purpose.
Just because you CAN execute fancy navigational menus doesn’t mean you SHOULD.

The research has been done. The results are in. It’s conclusive.

If the purpose of your site is to get people to engage in your technology, by all means put the gadgetry front and center.

If the purpose of your site is to help people navigate a buying process, then get your pencil-twirling self out of their way and help them find the cash register instead.

AIDA is a basic sales framework that stands for: Attention (Awareness), Interest, Desire and Action. In our offices, we add an S to the acronym. For Satisfaction. If you fail to satisfy, all the other letters don’t net you much more than alphabet soup.

To make this easy to ‘grok,’ let me share a little story with you.

The Relevance of Satisfaction

Once upon a time there was a bloodhound. He lived on a yellow (not brick) road in a cozy little dog house with a blue roof. He got his one square meal a day and spent a lot of time playing with his favorite red rubber ball. But dry kibble is a pale diet, and he was always on the lookout for something with greater culinary appeal.

Attention. With the 220 million smell receptors in his nose, he’d go sniffing. As he sniffed, he’d find grass, shrubberies, weeds. Maybe some crumpled paper or a crushed soda can. Not exactly the sort of stuff his stomach got excited about. But one day, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of something down the yellow (not brick) road.

Interest. There was a blue plate on the road. Something very interesting was on that blue plate. He lifted his nose into the air, catching the first tantalizing whiff of … could it be … it certainly smelled like it … MEAT!

Desire. Not only did it smell like meat, it looked like meat. Red and juicy. Very unlike crumpled paper. Very much like meat. Oh! I’ve always wanted meat! the bloodhound yearned, and he galumphed faster in anticipation toward the blue plate sitting on the yellow (not brick) road.

Action. The closer the bloodhound got to the blue plate, the more he was convinced this really was an exceptionally fine piece of meat. His enthusiasm grew by leaps and bounds, until, as certain as he could possibly be, he lept upon the object of his dreams.

Satisfaction. The first bite was better than he had ever imagined. By the third bite, he was feeling remarkably territorial about his piece of meat (he was of no mind about the blue plate). Everything that came before this sublime moment was nice and necessary, but pure delight was the payoff. This was one happy bloodhound. If you could have seen his tail, you’d know!

The end?

Business have always set out the equivalent of blue plates and then encouraged bloodhounds (prospects) to come along. It has been a numbers game. If enough bloodhounds come along (traffic), a few of them were sure to leap.

But suppose that meat is made of rubber. Suppose it tastes like battery acid. The modern bloodhound of today doesn’t just turn his nose up and walk away; he starts barking his twitter. He posts a review to your website and then one to his blog. He takes a video of the sorry mess and launches a youtube campaign. Soon those rubber meat images wind up featured on flickr.

The lesson for persuading today’s modern bloodhound is to serve up real meat and to keep providing the critical scent, from click to click and experience to experience, that keeps the bloodhound galumphing forward.

Doing business online – an environment in which taking action is the only tangible, measurable thing your visitors do – is only partly about capturing attention. You also have to be concerned with retention. Attention and retention. When you complete the momentum of AIDA with satisfaction, you complete the retention loop by making the process wholly customer-centered.

Satisfaction provides the critical closure for relevance.

How do you satisfy? It isn’t really very hard: you identify your central message of relevance, communicate it relevantly and remain true to it steadfastly in word and deed, in product and service.

Start thinking how you’re going to work at retaining all your bloodhounds, turning your yellow (not brick) road into the metaphorical equivalent of a Mobieus strip, by adding satisfaction into the equation. Satisfaction is the piece of the puzzle that allows you to truly integrate your branding efforts with your marketing efforts.

Bloodhounds remember where they found their satisfying, real, red, juicy meat. Their satisfaction makes it possible for you to capture their attention again and again!

In her article “Satellite radio runs into static,” Sarah McBride of “The Wall Street Journal” writes those numbers represent what satellite radio providers Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio lost respectively in 2005.

It’s proof positive that piles of money don’t buy business or marketing effectiveness.

Are You Sirius?

In his article, “Satellite Radio: Seriously, Folks, Are XM and Sirius Serious?” Denny Hatch of Target Marketing Group lays out more effective direct marketing tactics for these providers. About their Web sites, he writes, “Go to the Sirius or XM Web site, and you’ll find a lot of ‘it’ copy — radios, discounts, accessories, how to order, schedules and personalities, but not one single benefit of subscribing.”

Hatch doesn’t claim to be an expert in online persuasion, but he’s absolutely correct.

Satellite Radio Personas

As an experiment, I had one of my persuasion architects write up two very simple profiles (not quite full personas as neither Sirius nor XM is a client). These entry-level profiles may represent a couple of typical market segments for satellite radio:

Continue reading my column at ClickZ…