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.

1. a serious or respectable drama or film classic,
2. a romance or chick-friendly movie for the wife,
3. and some guilty pleasure action movie or low-brow comedy.

Guess which movie gets watched last or returned unwatched?

You betcha, it’s usually the drama/classic.  Oh the shame!

The thing is, unless I had added the high-brow movie to my “menu,” I’d likely have forgone the guilty pleasure of the action flick and just picked up the semi-respectable romantic comedy to watch with the wife.

Seems like recent scientific research shows it’s not just me and not limited to movies, either.  Apparently, diners given the option of salad are 3 times more likely to order french fries than if salad wasn’t on the menu.  Kind of counter-intuitive, when the healthy option spurs more unhealthy behavior.

But when you think about it, it kind of makes sense.  The fact that you thought about ordering the salad – and intend to order the salad at the next meal – helps you justify the french fries now, just like renting Touch of Evil helps me justify actually watching X2.  ‘Cause aren’t we all interested in eating desert now and working out later?  Would drinking be nearly as popular if the hangover came before the high?

So how can this apply to your business? Lots of ways, I’d guess, but the 2 that come to mind are as follows:

1) Charging the self-aware more money for the privilege of being restricted to the straight and narrow.  Chip and Dan Heath have an excellent article on this very strategy in the last issue of Fast Company.  People want to offload responsibility and even choice in order to circumvent their own “desert first” tendencies, and they’ll often pay you to help them overcome their own worst tendencies.

2) Front loading the exciting stuff while reassuring prospective customers that the good-for-you stuff is available/on its way. Amazon Prime is so incredibly seductive because 2-day shipping is within most people’s impulse-buy time horizon.  And it’s justifiable because, hey, shipping is free, and I’m sure I’ll get around to actually reading these books at some point, right?  And thus my antilibrary grows.

If you sell services, give some thought on how you can implement these techniqes, both from a business strategy and a web copy standpoint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Modeling Customer Psychology and Persuasive Online Copywriting

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

Once? Twice, maybe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recently, I went to MySpace.com to look up a semi-obscure band.  Why did I go there instead of my usual search engine query?  Because every band is on MySpace.  If you are a band, and live in the Milky Way solar system, you are on MySpace, and everyone knows it.  It’s the kind of reputation you could leverage into ad revenue…you know, relevant banner ads, text ads, promotions, etc.

Midway through my brief listening session, the infamous MySpace music player stopped performing its function and overlayed an ad.  To continue listening, I had to dismiss a very intrusive banner.

I won’t waste anyone’s time with why interrupting my favorite song with a banner ad that has to be actively dismissed is a bad idea.  Instead, let’s follow the experience of that one visitor in a million who wants to stop listening to cool music, go off to another site, and take a completely different action.

So let’s look at the persuasion scenario the advertiser, Dominoes Pizza, has paid to funnel us into.

The Creative: It’s professional-looking, but it could at least try to have something to do with music.  The call to action button doesn’t really stand out or contrast, and it’s asking for a lot (go from listening to music to ordering food online).

The Landing Page: Yikes, that doesn’t look very fun.  Where’s the scent of information for me to follow?  Am I in the right place?  They also get bonus points for giving me a promotional price on 3 medium pizzas instead of sandwiches!

The Rest of the Scenario: I clicked into the scenario a bit deeper out of morbid curiosity.  Once again, nothing makes me more persuaded to order sandwiches online than a big picture of a plain cheese pizza.  The whole experience seems geared towards ordering pizza, which makes sense if I am a direct entry visitor.  Couldn’t they pass a parameter so the page defaults to the Sandwiches tab?

Disruptive advertising is risky. I’ve already started a mental list of brands I now hate because they interrupted my music listening (Blockbuster and Insurance.com joined the list).  So, if you’re going to risk a bad “brand exposure,” and a backlash of negative word of mouth (or worse yet, bloggers ), you’d better have your ducks in a row for those who actually click through into your conversion funnel.

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?

When Michael Lewis wrote his article on Coach Leach and the Texas Tech Football program, that program was known as an offensive powerhouse that relied on sheer scoring power to outgun opponents.  Its defense wasn’t mentioned in that article, and one can only guess the omission was intentional.  Just look at their game results against Texas and OSU for 2005-2008:

What you can see is that up to 2007, Texas Tech continually increased it’s offensive scoring, but to mixed results – because Texas and OSU still outscored them.  Texas Tech’s defense was losing these big games.  So immediately following his team’s 2007’s bitter loss to OSU, Coach Leach changed defensive coordinators.

And after that, well, you can see for yourself: Texas Tech is undefeated this season and the major game-changing difference in their match-ups against Texas and OSU wasn’t the ability to score more points, but to hold those other teams’ offenses to significantly fewer goals.

So what does this have to do with Web Optimization?

In tougher times, most companies reinforce their strengths; doing what’s worked well before.  But few are really willing to look at their organizational assumptions and weaknesses head-on.

In terms of web optimization for hard times, it might not be just a matter of improving website performance, it might be a matter of changing the offer.  Or changing the emotional appeal behind the offer.  Or the guarantees and risk-reversals that you’re using.

Roy Williams has addressed this issue over several Monday Morning Memos and I think his analysis and advice has only grown more relevant as the months have passed by:

• Expect more people to be hardheaded in judging value.
• Be willing to expand beyond your current comfort zone and offerings/marketing in order to reach and convert these skeptical, hard-nosed value shoppers.
• Expect stories and long copy to make products and services more saleable (faster to sell and more easily sold), but test very carefully before concluding they’ll allow you to sell them at higher prices.

So what about you and your Website: are you looking beyond what you’ve always done well?  What assumptions are you changing and what competitive weaknesses are you looking to shore up?

“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.

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

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

He’ll keep the money.

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

Personas vs. Segmentation/Demographics

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

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

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

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

Using Personas to Take Action and Build Persuasion Scenarios

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melissa is on her way to becoming a lead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Cross posted from ClickZ.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So where does that leave traditional Information Architecture?

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

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

But before we discuss how the iPhone team does it, I’d like to show you a few other examples that illustrate some of the dos and don’ts — mostly “dos” — for using online video as part of your overall Web strategy.

• Ebags.com – Ebags features videos of some of their handbag designers by giving the designers their own category page with which to showcase their own products. Here’s an example from the Antoinette Lee Designs. When you click on the video, you’ll see Antoinette talks about her background and her inspiration — very cool. It’s refreshing to get a sense of who’s designing the handbag. It creates a more personal connection with the designer and her product. Again, a fabulous use of video.

• 4Q – Avinash Kaushik and iPerceptions have teamed up to develop a free online customer survey product called 4Q. The landing page links to this YouTube video where Avinash actually walks you through setting up a 4Q survey on your site. I like this video for a lot of reasons. I like Avinash’s delivery (”You just finished step one. Give yourself a hug!”), and you can actually go through the whole process, screen-by-screen, from the sign-up page through putting the code on your site. So often with software, we see a screen (think sign-up process page) and have no idea what’s coming next. This step-by-step approach helps people mentally go through the process before they even sign up — a brilliant way to remove barriers and inspire confidence in the product.

• Microsoft Dynamics – I know they’re an easy target, but this micro-site for Microsoft Dynamics, a business management software product, has a lot of dos and don’ts in one place. Click on the actors to launch the videos and you’ll see what I mean. While I like the direction Microsoft is going, I think they hurt themselves with the execution. Similar to the 4Q video, Microsoft shows actual screenshots, so you can get a sense of what it would feel like to use their software. But unlike 4Q, they only show the interface briefly, so it’s not as thorough. Microsoft also customized each video to attract different people within a company who might potentially use the software. From the “typical IT Manager,” to the “typical Marketing Manager,” to the “typical Finance Manager,” each video targets specific things that each of these people segments care about.

But Microsoft’s videos aren’t as effective as they could be. They don’t feel authentic. These are obviously actors, using hokey language like, “I’m your typical Sales Manager.” What’s up with that? Because these people feel so plastic, their message doesn’t resonate with me the same way a more authentic delivery would. Which brings me to my final example…

• Apple iPhone 3G – Ah, yes, the iPhone. Leave it to Apple to be ready with a great online experience to explain everything you need to know about the new iPhone on the very day it’s announced. With the next generation iPhone 2.0 operating system, Apple is making a very bold move. They’re positioning the device as the must-have business solution for any type of industry — even the Army! On the iPhone enterprise page, Apple links to a video that proves in no uncertain terms that top companies are relying on the iPhone for their most important work.

• The video features top companies using the iPhone. There is instant credibility. (”If it’s good enough for Disney and The Army, it’s good enough for me.”)
• In the IT industry, the top sources of information are peers and colleagues. Rather than having sales people (or actors) talking about the iPhone’s features, we see actual IT people talking in their language about why they like the iPhone and its specific capabilities.
• The video shows the phone in use, so you can picture yourself connecting through your VPN or using it for other applications. Or just holding it.

What’s your company doing with video to help sell products online? If you’ve found other ways that are new and effective, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

. .

About the Author: Holly Buchanan is a “typical Persuasion Architect” at FutureNow, Inc. She’s co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth and an expert in planning online persuasion scenarios.

The Google Analytics team just announced some nice updates. Yes, the interface has been translated into Thai, Filipino, Indonesian, Czech, Hungarian, and Portuguese, but there’s another story happening between the lines about the switch from “urchin.js” javascript to the new “ga.js” standard, which doesn’t require tagging an entire Web page just to measure a single action. The big news is how the switch to ga.js javascript will change how Google Analytics users plan and optimize their online marketing.

The change in script reflects the fact that “page views” are dead (although some have replaced them with zombie metrics). Additionally, this round of GA updates makes it easier to track ecommerce transactions and see how metrics relate to each other. But you can’t see how visitor actions relate to each other — yet.

Now that visitor action can be called “events” and tracked with ga.js tags, it’s going to be much easier for GA users to see how a series of actions tie together. Fortunately, Google has built an “event tracking” interface to help you take advantage of the more robust ga.js script. For now, it’s in closed beta, but when it launches, the reports will look something like this:

The challenge for marketers, analytics specialists, and anyone who’s a little of both — either by training or necessity — is to realize that standardized metrics aren’t enough. Event Tracking isn’t about measuring how many times visitors complete one-off actions. (If you do only that, the feature will be, in most cases, meaningless — or “cool,” which can be even more misleading.) Nope. Event Tracking is about measuring scenarios.

Since it’s designed to help you measure the relationships between actions and content, the to-be-launched Event Tracking interface should encourage GA users to do a better job of planing the visitor experience and to not be content with the same old generic data.

Looks like 2008 will be good year to be in the scenario planning and optimization business!

[Image credit: Marketing Pilgrim. If you'd like to learn more about how to use the latest version of Google Analytics, these updates aside, Avinash has you covered. To read more about the use the most recent updates, see WebProNews and ProBlogger.]

Just then, the resort cabana boy walks up and inquires, “Would you like some water mist spray?” And just like that, I was cooled down with the fine mist of cold water.

It was a life-altering moment.

I wanted to pack up that cabana boy and take him home with me. (I know what you’re thinking; it wasn’t like that.) It was simply so amazing to have someone anticipate my need and meet it at the same exact moment. This is why planning scenarios [define] is so important. Well-planned scenarios are all about anticipating your customers’ needs at the exact moment that need arises.

Scenarios are important both online and offline.

As long as we’re on the subject of resorts, lets go to my other favorite subject — spas. I was recently at The Boulders near Scottsdale. This place is truly amazing in their ability to get inside customers’ heads, understanding the exact point at which their needs arise, then satisfying those needs. It’s not always the big things that most impress your customers. With all the millions they poured into this resort, the thing that impressed me most was — drum-roll, please — a plastic bag.

Here’s the scenario — You’re a visitor at the spa. The spa area has a lovely pool and hot tub. Every spa visitor gets a locker with a comfy bathrobe and slippers. I’m at my locker, changing out of my wet bathing suit back into clothes to go back to my casita. (Sorry, but it’s just so much fun to say “my casita.”) Anyhooo, I realize that I have a wet bathing suit that I’m going to have to put into my purse to take back to my casita. I’m not happy about this. I take my bathrobe and slippers to the appointed bin to drop them off, and what’s sitting right at the side of that bin? A roll of plastic bags. Exactly what I need to transport my wet bathing suit.

Here’s another scenario — Most hotel rooms have magazines on the coffee table. Makes sense. But where else might you like to have a leisurely read? In my toilet room (yes, it has it’s own separate room), there’s a magazine rack with a lovely variety of mags to peruse. Now, I am no commode Cosmo reader, but I know several people who would much appreciate this anticipation of that need, and the presentation of the solution to that need at the very point they realize it.

One more scenario — You’re returning from the pool or going for a hike around the property. You may require services along the way for which ettiqutte would suggest you provide a tip. But you’re without your purse or any cash on your person. So the resort charges one daily service fee. Now, some people may not like that approach. But I can’t tell you how many times I found myself in that very position receiving a service and not having any money on hand. It saved me from that embarrassing position of looking like a cheap you-know-what when you don’t tip.

Offline, plan your customer scenarios. Anticipate and meet your customers’ needs at every step. Do the same thing online. At the very point a visitor says, “Gee, I’d like to have this,” provide it for them. At the very point they have a question, answer it. At the very point they wonder about returning a product, provide a return policy in plain language, right there on that product page (as opposed to buried in your FAQ). If you know women have a hard time buying bathing suits online, provide more exact sizing than just small, medium and large. (Victoria’s Secret sells many bathing suit tops by bra size so you can be sure you’re getting the right size.)

Anticipate your visitors’ needs and meet them at the very moment that need arises. Every website should have its own version of a cabana boy. It will lead to not only satisfied customers, but delighted customers.

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.

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.

I started as any modern, connected man would; I searched on Google for “diamond earrings.” I then visited the big-brand diamond sites. After a handful of clicks, I didn’t find what I was looking for. But I did find something else: a diamond mine of e-tailing opportunities.

It should come as no surprise that I’m squarely in the uniformed category when it comes to diamond earrings. So I continued my search, clumsily clicking through category page after category page, site after site. Sooner or later I was bound to find the earrings I’d envisioned dangling from my wife’s ears. I felt trapped in my own ignorance.

I decided to expand my search with more descriptive terms. I began to lose patience. Just as I was losing hope, I found a site with the handle I needed. The style of earrings I was looking for are called drop earrings.

This cycle of ignorant buying repeats itself hundreds of thousands of times a day, in thousands of different product and service categories. Sometimes the e-tailer wins, sometimes the offline seller wins. Sometimes, nobody wins and credit cards remain sheathed in wallets. Just because prospects don’t know how to search the way you hope and expect them to doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified and ready to buy.

Continue reading my column on ClickZ…

As with ads in any medium, those that work are those that start with an insight, show an understanding of their target audience, and have an authentic, relevant connection to the brand. Those that don’t smack of having been produced because someone wanted to do a viral video to please himself, his boss or his board. They’re the commercial equivalent of YouTube videos of kids falling off skateboards.

I couldn’t agree more. Too bad the insight part is the key, and plucking those off trees isn’t exactly a viable strategy in 2007.

Keyword inflation, low conversion rates sending merchants elsewhere

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — A growing number of online advertisers are bidding a partial goodbye to Google Inc.

Frustrated by the soaring price of Internet-search advertising and diminishing returns from the ads they buy, mid-sized advertisers say they plan to reduce how much business they do with Google this year — in some cases, significantly.

Last year, for example, eBags.com co-founder Peter Cobb spent between $5 million and $8 million to peddle suitcases, handbags and other carrying cases online. Google got 75% of that amount.

But this year it will get “significantly less,” Cobb said. “The Google percentage has got to go down,” he said.

In many cases, the cost of an eBags.com ad placed on either Google’s own Web site or one of its affiliates now equals 45% of the price of the product it promotes. That’s crimping the company’s own profit margins and forcing it to look elsewhere to market its bags.

“We’re testing print ads right now,” said Cobb, whose company will spend up to $8 million on ads in 2007. Read the rest of the article

The article continues…

Keyword search prices on many terms rose between 40% and 60% last year, according to advertisers like Dan Sackrowitz, chief executive of Bare Necessities, which sells lingerie online. He saw his Google ad budget soar 50% last year.

The problem is obvious, traffic costs are puffing up like a marshmallow in a microwave and advertisers are having a hard time finding ways to increase traffic and lower costs. Simply put, Google advertisers are hooked.

Instead of looking for ways to increase return on traffic investment, the average marketer will look for another traffic fix. We’ve said before that the marketing battleground of the future is not traffic acquisition, it will be traffic conversion.

The exceptional marketer is looking for ways to optimize their keyword and landing page conversion rates.

Optimizing landing pages is something we’ve been doing with our clients for quite some time. We are a premier channel partner with Google and their new testing platform Google Website Optimizer beta. If you are interesting in our landing page optimization coaching service, we are going to take on a few testers over the next few weeks to participate in this beta with us. Contact us if you want to know more.

A local coin dealer in Dover, Delaware pulled off a publicity stunt that got him some pretty good national attention. He "spent" a penny worth $500 and announced it to the world, or at least to Dover. The world was listening however and he got more publicity than he probably imagined. A great investment of only $500, right?

This could be the end of the story, but I wanted to know more.

I found the guy’s web site. First thing I clicked on was the Contact Us page. Wow. Closed. Your ‘contact us’ page on your web site is closed? What the heck? Clicked on Inventory…closed. Wantlist…closed. Some of them opened into new browser sessions with no other Nav and no chance to use the back button. There was content on some of the pages, but nothing on some of the key pages. (read more about the importance of the contact and about pages by following the links to Bryan Eisenberg’s ClickZ articles in this story).

OK, I finally spotted a navigation link to the tale of the $500 penny. The link was the 2nd to last on the left-nav list. Somebody found the penny today and they will be splitting the $500 reward with friends. Cool. Why wasn’t it on the home page? I can’t give you a link to the exact page because the site doesn’t work that way. Whatever I click on, I just get the main url.

We tell our clients to make sure ALL of their messaging is aligned. Don’t run a campaign (advertising or public relations, or even a publicity stunt) to drive people to your web site without making sure your web site is in order. Make sure people FIND what they are expecting to find. The real-world equivalent would be to have an residential open house and leave dirty clothes and pizza boxes lying about in the living room.

The internal message must be, “Our guests will be arriving soon…let’s clean up around here!”

My evaluation of the terrific $500 publicity stunt is that it generated much more than $500 in lost sales because of reduced confidence in the business. The business owner will think it was a success because some people mentioned it and his friends thought it was cool to get all that free publicity. Serious coin collectors left the site shaking their heads. He’ll never be able to measure those results.

We decided to draft up a basic profile of a typical user and click through the site and see what kind of experience this profile would have. This is a very simplistic execution of what we do when we assemble a "PSA" for one of our clients. 

Watch the video.  (5 min. 29 sec.  11MB Flash)

(Kudos to our bud Betsy Weber, who does a fantastic job ‘evangelizing’ Techsmith products, we got to test drive the new Camtasia Studio 4 to put this video together, from what I understand the new version will be out October 17th, so if you do any sort of screen recording, get familiar with Camtasia Studio)

“She was a quiet and powerful beast, and she died doing what she loved,” states one observer.

“While Web 2.0 technologies and persuasive scenarios were certainly contributing factors, we have determined they were not the cause of death,” said a spokesman for the Web page’s care provider. “She was just too irrelevant, and she never quite recovered. She just couldn’t keep pace or serve the needs of today’s marketers any longer.”

Online businesses and marketers are devastated by the news.

“She meant so much to those of us who work online. None of us could have accomplished what we’ve done without her. She’ll go down as one of the great contributors to our bottom lines and to society as a whole,” said one mourner on the scene.

Typical Web analytics jockeys will likely be hit hardest of all.

“What are we gonna do now? What do we do with all these page hits? What will we track? How will we help our clients be successful?” said Iam Du’um, CEO of How Idiots Track Success Ltd., a small traffic-building and Web analytics consulting firm whose business focuses on helping clients increase their exposure by increasing Web page “hits” and, most recently, page “views.”

Other experts disagree.

Continue reading my column at ClickZ… 

"She was a quiet and powerful beast, and she died doing what she loved," states one observer.

"While Web 2.0 technologies and persuasive scenarios were certainly contributing factors, we have determined they were not the cause of death," said a spokesman for the Web page’s care provider. "She was just too irrelevant, and she never quite recovered. She just couldn’t keep pace or serve the needs of today’s marketers any longer."

Read Bryan’s Entire Article over at Clickz.

You’ve seen Cesar Millan, the infamous ‘dog psychology’ dude.  Cesar works miracles with unruly canines in 24 short minutes on the National Geographic Channel show "The Dog Whisperer". 

Now meet Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, the Cat Whisperers.

The authors of "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing" have set forth an intriguing set of principles which they call Persuasion Architecture. The formula is not for the faint-hearted — it involves hard work to navigate a complicated matrix of psychological, technical and demographic approaches in order to develop a customer-centric marketing focus. In the process, it requires a business to be willing to relinquish control of information about its product or service; indeed, transparency is key to the entire process. But the authors guarantee results, whether your target clients are individuals or other businesses. Read the entire review over at Wharton School Knowledge @ W.P. Carey.

Have an unruly marketing situation? Will travel.