The Holistic Web

In a traditional company, you’ll have product or service to sell. There’ll be people making the product, marketing people promoting and creating demand, and sales people completing the sale.

In ecommerce, it shouldn’t be that different. But it is. This is what I typically see:

The person owning the business makes or sources the products. They get someone to make the website. Someone does the marketing - SEO, SEM, PR, etc. There’ll be a designer to make it all look pretty. There’s one thing missing though. Can you see it? Who is doing the selling? Well that’s easy you say, it’s the website itself. That’s the beauty of ecommerce, it replaces the need for sales people, it allows you to scale up. Ok, fine, I buy that. So who is in charge of making sure the website makes as many sales as possible?

That’s about the point where I hear silence and lots of ummms and ahhhs. It’s crazy - arguably the single most important thing, making sure the website actually sells, and it’s neglected. It’s a bit like getting an expensive car, marketing it and then asking an 8 year old to sell it. Sure, they’ll sell a few, but a seasoned, experienced sales person will sell many times more.
Don’t get sales blindness - sell your products!

I’m lucky to live really close a stretch of shops with awesome food (Ramsay St for those who know Sydney). Every Saturday, there’s lines out the door and sometimes around the corner at two of the bakeries. Literally a few doors down is a fresh pasta place. They do absolutely awesome pasta, and it’s a strongly Italian area. However, it’s usually empty on a Saturday morning.

There’s a bunch of reasons why that might be, but I have one theory: urgency.

Fresh bread is great when you first buy it, good the end of the day and only ok the next day. Everyone knows that. Sure, you can freeze it, but it’s never quite the same.

The pasta shop also sells it frozen, and encourages freezing of it. No urgency, no compulsion to buy NOW. It’ll still be there tomorrow. It’s just a theory, but I’d love to see what would happen if they turned it on its head and, as much as possible, promoted it like bread - must be bought fresh, best for a day or two.
It’s been long established that urgency promotes sales. It’s a great idea to put in place a timeline, even if it’s artificial, to boost sales.

• Limited offer free shipping
• Free widget with orders this week
• 10% off today only

etc.

What gets your visitors motivated to take action? You need to think about providing them with relevant information.

If you were trying to motivate a dog, what would work better: the world’s tastiest, freshest, best carrot, or any old piece of meat?

Be careful you aren’t spending too much time making carrots…

(inspired by “The Principles of Effective Copywriting” DVD)

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.