The Holistic Web

I’ve been doing a lot of reading recently (as always), and one thing that has come up again and again and again is: you can’t trust what people say. Let me give some examples of stuff I’ve been reading:

• In a double blind clinical trial for a sleeping tablet, 90% of people reported it effective, versus 60% who reported the placebo effective. I read a lot of clinical trials (yes, strange, I know), and it’s quite normal to find that ratio of effectiveness vs placebo.
• In “Blink” (great book), a case where people were tasting Sprite and asked how much lime was in there. The answer would be directly related to the colour of the can - a greener can would invariably give a more limey taste, with no change to the formula at all.
• Adding a phone number to a web page increased sales dramatically - without generating a single phone call. A phone number generates a perception of trust. I didn’t do follow up research but I’m sure none of the new customers would attribute their signing up to the appearance of a phone number, but statistically, there’s a fair chance they did.

I’ve bumped into many, many more, but some are a bit too complex to be contained in a blog friendly nugget. The thing in common is that people say one thing - and truly believe it - but the real reason is not at all the same. They say it has more lemon, but it doesn’t.

Our minds are fooled very easily. As horrible as it might seem, the conclusion to reach is that many of our decisions are determined by our subconscious based on reasons we don’t know.We try and rationalise things, and so we willingly offer an explanation is prompted, but often that explanation is simple a rationalisation of what has already happened subconsciously, and isn’t the real reason.
Yet, so many people and companies still believe in things like surveys and focus groups (where as well as the above issues you also get group think). I’m not saying those things are useless, they have their place, but unless you understand these broader issues and make sure you are asking the right questions in the right way, you’ll get a result that seems right, but probably isn’t.

It increasingly seems that to be successful in the online realm, you need to be a psychologist as much as a marketer. Fortunately, the process we use is fundamentally based around people’s psychology - I’m growing increasingly aware of how right that approach is.

From the book “Nudge”:

You are more likely to agree to an operation if you’re told that 90 out of 100 people who had it are still alive five years later than if you’re told that 10 out of 100 people die from it.

Food for thought there.

No matter how many times I do them, I am always amazed at how much of a difference split testing makes.

I had a difference of opinion with a client recently about how a landing page for a fairly large budget campaign should be constructed. We went with a compromise solution, but I still wasn’t happy. I offered to do a test on the compromise version versus my ideal version. To his credit, he willingly agreed. The test isn’t quite finished yet, but so far it’s showing a 113% performance improvement - more than double!
If you aren’t split testing, why not? Of course, you can let me know if you want help with it.

Edit: test is now complete, at 158% improvement! Wow. 

Recently, I’ve been dealing with several established ecommerce sites and a few yet-to-be-launched sites at the same time. The difference between them is interesting.

The ones that haven’t started up yet are generally just talking about design. It’s all about the graphic design, the look and feel.

The established ones, design is just one part of the mix. The things they focus on are sales, features, conversions, marketing opportunities. And, yes, they think about design, but it’s rarely top of the list.

Sure, to some extent it’s comparing apples with oranges. The established sites already have designs. The point though is that most new sites spend too much time thinking about design. They agonise over small details, but are doing this in a void, with no customer feedback.

We’ve probably all heard about the phenomenal success of Zappos. Another site I like to point people to is Blair. Zappos is taking the world by storm with it’s phenomenal sales. Blair is consistently one of the top converting sites on the web. Both are, in my opinion, quite ugly sites (and Zappos redesigned recently!)

For those in startup, agonising over a few pixels, think: do I know more than Zappos or Blair? Not that the goal is to try and be ugly, a nice site is always better of course. The goal is to sell, and they do that well, so take a few hints from them.

An interesting post about the power of word of mouth marketing from the folks at FreshChat. One example:

Recommendations from family and friends trump all other consumer touchpoints when it comes to influencing purchases, according to new data from Publicis media network ZenithOptimedia. (AdAge, April, 2008)

Via Shifted Pixels blog (and got to there via Twitter

I’ve been re-reading Malcolm Gladwell’s classic “Blink”. It’s a great book about how we react to things very quickly, before our brains are aware of it. This is applicable to ecommerce in many ways - what are the unconcious cues we give our visitors which persuade or dissuade them from buying?

Gladwell talks about tests done by John Bargh at New York University. The book gives a fair bit of detail so I’ll try and summarise.

His test participants thought they were doing some sort of cognition/English test. He would give them, for example, 5 words such as:

“from are Florida oranges temperature”

And they would need to construct a four word sentence from that. Pretty easy. However, that wasn’t the real test. The real test was called “priming”. Through these sentence groupings he would scatter words to influence the person, to see how it would affect their behaviour.

In one example, one group of students were given a bunch of words such as rude, bold, disturb, bother, intrude, etc. The other group were given respect, yield, polite, courteous, etc. The students on completing the “test” were told to go to a nearby office to get their next assignment. This is where the real test started. When they got to the office, the person they were to see was busy talking to someone else. The people were timed to see how long it would take them to interrupt.

The group who had the rude words averaged five minutes. The “polite” group, 82% of them hadn’t interrupted by 10 minutes (the limit for ethical reasons).

The book gives several other convincing examples about how the words used to prime people, or in some cases, words people were led to use themselves, influenced their later performance.

The question is, how can this be used to prime our site visitors? Surely there must be a way to increase conversions. It also opens up a bit of an ethics grab bag. Is this unethical, is it too manipulative? I would say not, but curious to hear other views on it.

I bumped into this oldish post on Wants make the world go ’round … saleswise.

You can’t sell the features … you can sell the feeling that will come after the purchase.

How true that is.

Pretty much anyone in the ecommerce world has heard about the amazing work Zappos are doing, particularly in innovation around customer service and staff management.

It turns out innovation can be a good thing! I just saw these sales figures on the Zappo’s “About Us” page:

1999: Almost nothing
2000: $ 1.6 mm
2001: $ 8.6 mm
2002: $ 32 mm
2003: $ 70 mm
2004: $184 mm
2005: $370 mm
2006: $597 mm
2007: $840 mm
2008: Over $1 billion (goal)

Wow! is all I can say to numbers like that. Don’t we all dream of that…

One of the challenges of SEO work on a global stage is that Google defaults to a country biased view. For example, I’m in Australia, but even when I go to google.com (as opposed to google.com.au) I still get Australian slanted results because it recognises I’m in Australia. Normally that’s a good thing. Sometimes you want to get another view though, and in that case, you can use:

http://www.google.com/ncr

NCR = “no country redirect”. This shows you the Google results without any bias.

Personally, I was quite please as I checked a few search terms which I rank top 5 for in Australia and was pleased to find them top 20 in the NCR version

I spend a lot of time looking at successful ecommerce sites, studying what they’ve done and how they have achieved their success. I have endless documents full of notes, folders full of screenshots, spreadsheets full of comparisons, etc. One site that has stood out as being extremely innovative is Endless. They sell shoes and handbags, and are owned by Amazon - I guess it’s Amazon trying to focus on a niche.

I did a screencast highlighting some of their innovative features which I’m sure must be increasing conversions (I haven’t actually seen any data, but I’d be pretty darn sure they are getting well above 5%).

Watch the screencast (6 minutes).