Jeff Sexton Writes

Braving the demons of the deep in search of great copy

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"Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature... what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action... if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being."

~William Bernbach

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For awhile, the con­ven­tional wis­dom online was that neg­a­tive reviews typ­i­cally helped sales by lend­ing cred­i­bil­ity to pos­i­tive reviews, so long as the pos­i­tive reviews sig­nif­i­cantly out­weighed the negative.

Of course, it’s a lot dicier than that, though, isn’t it?  A ream of other fac­tors come to mind almost instantly, for any­one who has ever shopped on Ama­zon or Zap­pos or any other review-heavy site:

• How artic­u­late and spe­cific are the neg­a­tive reviews?
• How much are the neg­a­tive reviews in agree­ment about the fail­ings of the product?
• How damn­ing are these spe­cific faults?
• Do any of them con­tra­dict your brand promise?
• Do any of the pos­i­tive reviews coun­ter­mand the points raised by the neg­a­tive reviews?

But the ques­tion remains: on aver­age, how many neg­a­tive reviews does it take to make a shop­per recon­sider a purchase?

The answer, it turns out, is some­where around three.

And that sounds about right for any­thing but books, movies, and music — those cat­e­gories are dif­fer­ent, since polar­iz­ing ideas and art attract as much as they repulse.

Still, even accept­ing the 3 neg­a­tive review rule, there’s a big dif­fer­ence between a neg­a­tive review of a shoe on Zap­pos and a neg­a­tive review on your Web­site, I’ll bet.  Here’s why:

1) You’re likely either a man­u­fac­turer or cura­tor of the prod­ucts you sell

If Wal­mart has a badly reviewed item, they can just drop it. Plus, they likely have sev­eral other options for cus­tomers to choose from. That bad review doesn’t truly reflect on them.  And it’s the same thing with Zappos.

But if you actu­ally MAKE the prod­ucts, it’s a dif­fer­ent story. Espe­cially if that bad review con­tra­dicts your mar­keted qual­ity claims. If you man­u­fac­ture com­puter back­packs, for exam­ple, and your claim to fame is tough func­tion­al­ity, then neg­a­tive review over a a bag that frayed and became all-but unser­vice­able in only 6 months rep­re­sents a much big­ger prob­lem for you than for a mass e-tailer like ebags.com

Sim­i­larly, if you’re a small retailer spe­cial­iz­ing in, say, stereo equip­ment, and you mar­ket your­self as the audiophile’s choice and the place for the dis­crim­i­nat­ing buyer, then the lines and brands you carry and the equip­ment you sell all carry with them an implicit rec­om­men­da­tion: if you’re car­ry­ing it, it must be good. So a neg­a­tive review becomes an attack on your expertise/recommendation.  Not good.

2) You’re likely com­pet­ing on qual­ity and cus­tomer satisfaction

Whether a neg­a­tive review is fair or not, it almost always beto­kens an unhappy cus­tomer.  Occa­sion­ally, the reviewer might com­mend your res­o­lu­tion of their com­plaint or dis­sat­is­fac­tion within their neg­a­tive review, but this is far more the excep­tion than the rule. Most neg­a­tive reviews just trash the prod­uct.  And if your brand promise cen­ters around sat­is­fac­tion, neg­a­tive reviews of this kind hurt your credibility.

What Lands End Could Learn from Orvis

So I was look­ing at buy­ing a new blazer recently, and came across the fol­low­ing reviews of Lands’ End’s Year Round Blazer:

So, you get the pic­ture right?  Lots of reviews call­ing Land’s End out on dra­mat­i­cally reduced qual­ity and sub-par value for the price point.  And qual­ity and value ARE this brands sup­posed call­ing cards, so you’d think that Land’s End might want to DO some­thing about that.

But then, what can they do?  They’ve promised to post all hon­est reviews, so they have to let the neg­a­tive reviews stand.

Well, they could do what Orvis does when a neg­a­tive review pops up.  Take a look:

And that’s how you do it.  You REMIND your cus­tomers of your sat­is­fac­tion guar­an­tees and you vis­i­bly show poten­tial shop­pers that you did every­thing pos­si­ble to resolve the issues brought forth in the review.

Now, Ama­zon and Zap­pos prob­a­bly can’t do that, due to the sheer num­ber of SKUs and reviews they deal with. But YOU can and should do it.

So when it comes to cus­tomer reviews, be like Orvis not Land’s End.

A few weeks ago I held a quick and dirty Web­site Opti­miza­tion con­test for one page of Crutchfield’s check-out process. And great things came from that, as Crutch­field kicked in a $75 dol­lar gift cer­tifi­cate to the win­ner, and Jef­frey and Bryan Eisen­berg also donated some signed copies of their books.

But even bet­ter than all of that, I had some really sharp read­ers sug­gest great changes and even pro­duce a few mock-ups of those changes/alternative page designs. Best of all, I left sort­ing through those sug­ges­tions up to Bryan and Jef­frey Eisen­berg, who vol­un­teered to act as judges for the con­test.  So here’s their judgement:

The over­all design win­ner is Alex Fisken of UX Asso­ciates.

Here’s the design Alex came up with (w/ analy­sis of good and bad aspects to follow):

So the good parts of this design are all up at the top of the page:

1. It’s clear that the user has entered into part of the check-out process, because the var­i­ous check­out stages are clearly labeled at the top of the page and the cur­rent stage — that of select­ing acces­sories — is appro­pri­ately highlighted
2. It’s per­fectly, explic­itly clear that the item has been added to cart.
3. The two but­tons for con­tinue to cart and keep shop­ping are eas­ily dis­tin­guished based on color, size, and shape
4. The arrow point­ing down to “Choose rec­om­mended acces­sories makes it abun­dantly clear that the user is being offered a chance to select acces­sories for his already-added-to-cart TV

And now for the not so good parts:

• The “con­tinue” of “con­tinue onto shop­ping cart” might be eas­ily con­fused as a “con­tinue shop­ping” since that is very com­mon word­ing for a lot of check­out processes. Might be bet­ter to weak that to “pro­ceed to shop­ping cart” (or to at least test it).
• The word­ing on “Choose rec­om­mended acces­sories” is liable to dam­age the very point of the page — to sell more acces­sories. See­ing that phrase causes read­ers to ask, “On what basis are these acces­sories being rec­om­mended?  And why are you push­ing these cross-sells on me?” Might be bet­ter to weak or test this word­ing to some­thing more appropriate

Kevin McCaffrey’s Awe­some Acces­sory Section

And that last point brings us to our Run­ner Up, Kevin McCaf­frey of Con­ver­sion Rate Ser­vices, who rec­om­mended much bet­ter word­ing for this sec­tion of the page, as seen in his mock-up:

First, the “Do you need” for­mat­ting of the ques­tion is both more direct and more appro­pri­ate as it is framed from the buy­ers point of view (“I need to make sure I have every­thing I need” vs. “Don’t you want to buy some­thing else from us?”) and designed to solicit a response. We’re all hard­wired to answer ques­tions, so this phras­ing is harder to ignore than “Chose rec­om­mended accessories.”

I also like the option to click “no thanks,” as well as the but­ton to “see more wall mount brack­ets.” Great stuff.

Now, some might be won­der­ing, but doesn’t the offer have to be generic to all kinds of acces­sories, rather than spe­cific to Flat Screen TVs?

Answer: No. Not any­more and not if you are a big boy e-commerce player like Crutch­field. They can eas­ily use a ser­vice like Mon­e­tate to cus­tomize that call-out to the prod­uct, and, frankly, if they’re not doing that, they should be.

My Franken-page Mock-up

And know­ing that the top half of Alex’s design needed the bot­tom half of Kevin’s design, I couldn’t help but franken­stein them together to come up with this:

And that there is the con­clu­sion of the con­test. Con­grat­u­la­tions both to Alex and Kevin and a hearty thank you to all who par­tic­i­pated. The win­ners may col­lect their prizes by e-mailing me their addresses and con­tact info.

P.S. A spe­cial thanks to both Jef­frey and Bryan Eisen­berg and Crutch­field for help­ing out with this.

How cool are the guys at Crutchfield?

This after­noon I got a call from Crutch­field and they not only thanked me for yesterday’s post & con­test, but offered the win­ner a $75 gift cer­tifi­cate in addi­tion to what­ever prize Bryan, Jef­frey are going to award.  Love it.  Of course, in enter­ing the con­test and post­ing your suggestions/mock-ups to a pub­lic forum, you’re allow­ing Crutch­field to use those same rec­om­men­da­tions, just so we’re 100% clear.

But that leaves a few lin­ger­ing questions:

1) What are WE going to give the winner?

Well, it’s going to be a small stack of auto­graphed books and a small extra award (just a bit of lagniappe to sweeten the win­nings). Right now the books will be signed ver­sions of Call to Action, Always Be Test­ing, Mag­i­cal Worlds of the Wiz­ard of Ads, and Mar­ket­ing Outrageously.

2) How long do you have to sub­mit your sug­ges­tions / mock-ups?

We are accept­ing entries until the Fri­day after next, on the 4th of March, and Bryan and Jef­frey will be announc­ing the win­ners that fol­low­ing Monday.

If you haven’t already done so, go look at the already-submitted rec­om­men­da­tions and mock-ups. Some solid stuff has come in already. Plus, it’s good to size up the com­pe­ti­tion

Best of luck to every­one and thanks again to Crutchfield.

“As a per­son with autism, it is easy for me to under­stand how ani­mals think because my think­ing processes are like an animal’s” — Tem­ple Grandin

Because Tem­ple Grandin is spooked by the same things ani­mals are spooked by, she’s ide­ally suited for opti­miz­ing envi­ron­ments and han­dling sys­tems for them. For her, great design is all about elim­i­nat­ing any­thing that will cause anx­i­ety or doubt in the minds of the animals.

I often think of Web Opti­miza­tion in the same terms.  As a semi-luddite work­ing in the tech­nol­ogy field, I find myself spooked by the same things nor­mal cus­tomers are spooked by. Things that are intu­itive to tech nerds and coders are dis­tinc­tively NOT intu­itive to me.  And this makes me really, really good at opti­miz­ing Web­sites for nor­mal folk.

So with apolo­gies to Krug, my cen­tral ten­ant is “Don’t Make Me Doubt!”

• Elim­i­nate my doubts by let­ting me know what each action, click, form, but­ton will do before I’m asked to take that action.
• Don’t just answer my explicit ques­tions, ensure you also address my unar­tic­u­lated con­cerns.
• If you want me to click it, make it look click­able. Let me know what the but­ton will do.  Make it explicit and unambiguous.
• And yes, words mat­ter when it comes to usabil­ity — not just the freakin’ but­ton color!

In other words, design your Web­site so that there’s never any room for doubt.

Crutch­field Goons It up — Here’s Why…

And that brings me to a recent shop­ping expe­ri­ence with Crutch­field.  Now, Crutch­field does a lot of things right, includ­ing some rather rig­or­ous opti­miza­tion and split test­ing. But I really think they got at least part of this check-out process wrong. Here’s what happened…

I clicked the buy/add to cart but­ton for a new LCD TV, and was shown this screen:

Now, first of all, great job on try­ing to sell me on acces­sories I might need for my new TV. Nice cross-sell.  But, um, lousy job on exe­cu­tion and design — you’re spook­ing your cus­tomers, Crutch­field!  Here’s why:

1) The green box around the TV and the but­ton makes that part of the screen look like a ban­ner add, which almost made me scroll right past the darn thing because I’ve been trained to ignore ban­ner ads.

2) When I do scroll down, I’m pre­sented with a bunch of wall mounts and a but­ton that says: “add selected items to cart,” but I don’t see my TV as part of the add items, and I won­der whether or not the TV has been added to cart.

3) I scroll back up and read a state­ment that the TV Has been added to cart, but I’m then pre­sented with the option to “Skip This Step” — but I don’t want to skip adding the TV to my cart.  Grrr!

4) After a moment’s thought and a glance up at my cart icon I real­ize that the but­ton and the state­ment are NOT asso­ci­ated with one another, even though they are grouped together by that darn green box, caus­ing me to assume that they were some­how con­nected. Once I real­ize that, it becomes clear that the “step” I’m being offered to skip is the cross-sell oppor­tu­nity and not the already accom­plished step of adding my TV to my cart.

Think of this as a com­bined design/copywriting screw-up, where the design mis­com­mu­ni­cated the asso­ci­a­tion between the mes­sage and the but­ton, and the copy on the but­ton helped fos­ter that mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion by com­mu­ni­cat­ing a salesman’s point of view rather than a buyer’s point of view.  See in the minds of sales­men, cross sell­ing is a “step” in the sales process, but in the minds of buy­ers, there is no log­i­cal con­nec­tion between buy­ing some­thing and being cross-sold. It may be a reminder or oppor­tu­nity, but it’s not a “step.”

5) What exactly is the dif­fer­ence between a wall mount and a low pro­file wall mount? You’d think it refers to how close to the wall the TV mounts.  But then what does “super slim” mean?  Wouldn’t a super slim wall mount BE low pro­file?  Why don’t they have pic­tures?  Well, I guess I could click on the item, but… don’t want to be taken away from this page, espe­cially if I’m not totally sure the TV has been added to my cart and will fol­low me.

As it turns out, click­ing on the link doesn’t take me away from the page — it just pops up a pic­ture of the prod­uct, but really, I had no freakin’ way of know­ing that, so I nei­ther clicked the link, nor did I bother select­ing a wall mount.  Nor in fact, did I end up buy­ing anything.

How Would YOU Fix It?

Ok, so now that I’ve given you all the ways that my semi-luddite mind was spooked by this ungainly design/copywriting com­bi­na­tion, it’s YOUR turn to tell me how you’d fix it:

• What changes would you test first?
• What’s per­haps the ideal fix, and what rep­re­sents the most eas­ily imple­mented fix that’ll still get the job done?
• How much will you rely on design and how much on copy?
• Descrip­tions are great, but hyper­links to mock-ups are even bet­ter.  Use yFrog or something.

I’ll have Bryan and Jef­frey Eisen­berg judge the designs and we’ll pro­nounce a win­ner with some cool, to-be-determined award.

Give it your best shot in the comments!

P.S. Yes, dear reader, design and copy have to work together for best results.  Each influ­ences the other.  In fact, Jef­frey Eisen­berg and I will be teach­ing a newly revised ver­sion of Per­sua­sive Online Copy­writ­ing in order to address exactly these chal­lenges — how design and copy work together; how video and copy work together; how Social Media and con­tent mar­ket­ing and micro-copy work together.  It’s a hands on work­shop and it’s in Austin on April 30th and 31st.  You should come!

It’s a rare thing when I take excep­tion to one of Seth Godin’s posts. But his last post on “Too much data leads to not enough belief” had me quibbling.

Of course, there IS a lot that I agree with in the post: namely that peo­ple respond to a story and a tribal affil­i­a­tion far more strongly than they will ever respond to a spread­sheet.  But I guess from a Web per­spec­tive, the idea of gran­u­lar­ity and data as a hin­drance to belief just doesn’t square with my observations.

What I’ve tended to see is the following:

• Peo­ple go to the Web to check things out.  They’re specif­i­cally research­ing a pur­chas­ing deci­sion and are expect­ing more data from a Web­site than from an ad or even a direct mailer.  When you don’t pro­vide that data, peo­ple get suspicious.
• Con­tent rich Web­sites tend to con­vert bet­ter than con­tent poor sites. That doesn’t mean the data should take cen­ter stage or should replace a well-crafted story, just that those peo­ple who want to drill down on specifics, well, they want to be able to drill down on specifics.  And they’ll find those specifics from some­where, even if it’s from an ill-informed opin­ion on a forum somewhere.
• The mere pres­ence of (and access to) data is often enough to pro­vide con­fi­dence.  Data can some­times be like a pri­vacy pol­icy, most peo­ple just want to know that it exists and that you’re con­fi­dent enough to show it to them with­out really want­ing to exam­ine it in any great detail.  The mere fact that you have the infor­ma­tion and have pro­vided access to it is often enough to engen­der buyer confidence.

Can you imag­ine New­ton Run­ning being unwill­ing to show you the sci­ence behind their run­ning shoes?  What would that do to your con­fi­dence if they wouldn’t show you (or didn’t have any) data from their tests?

Again, I may not need to study their graphs or watch all of their videos or look up their patents, but the very fact that they’re pas­sion­ate enough to get into the nitty-gritty details with me — the fact that they do actu­ally have data — makes me far more will­ing to believe them and to buy a pair of their shoes than if they wanted me to just accept their product/idea on faith.

I also think that pas­sion­ate proof is an essen­tial ele­ment of any high-margin or pre­mium product’s Web­site, which is one of the main rea­sons I wrote my cri­tique of Best Made Axe’s lack of proof.

To me, data isn’t a hin­drance to pas­sion­ate belief — it’s proof of it. How can you be pas­sion­ate about an idea, design, or prod­uct unless you’re will­ing to put it to the test and show off the results?

What’s Your Experience

Of course, I’m always will­ing to hear thoughts from my read­ers. What do you guys and gals think?  What’s been your expe­ri­ence? Have you ever had a sit­u­a­tion where less would have been bet­ter when it came to proof and substantiation?

Con­ver­sion Opti­miza­tion con­sul­tants, more than a few copy­writ­ers, and most SEO experts used to look down on Flash-based sites.

Flash sites weren’t well indexed by search engines and had a bad habit of turn­ing a pull medium into a not-so-interactive video.  Oh, and their con­tent was often more gra­tu­itous than per­sua­sive in a flash-animated splash page sort of way.

Most all of that has changed, and we’re really start­ing to see inter­ac­tive video come into its own, as is the case with Eloqua’s new promotional/lead gen­er­a­tion video.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you really should take a few min­utes out of your day to take a look.  And maybe spend a few more min­utes to poke around dif­fer­ent path­ways and responses.

Another great exam­ple is Boone Oakley’s “YouTube Web­site,” as demon­strated by their home page that I’ve embed­ded below:

But make sure to look past the tech­nol­ogy to see the copywriting.

Yes, you read that right: I said copy­writ­ing. That video — includ­ing each and every one of it’s forked paths — was planned out, scripted, and sto­ry­boarded. The video is cool; the mes­sag­ing is brilliant.

Viewed through that lens, you’ll notice that most of the core per­sua­sive points remain the same regard­less of whether you click on “Mar­ket­ing” or “Sales” or “Exec­u­tive.”  What changes is the focus on this or that fea­ture set, the videos order­ing of tak­ing points, and the per­spec­tive in which some of the mate­r­ial is cov­ered.  Bril­liant.  And a tech­nique that Bryan and Jef­frey Eisen­berg pio­neered with text-and-hyperlink-based sites.

So while I love the video and I think it rep­re­sents new oppor­tu­ni­ties to inject per­son­al­ity and charisma into inter­ac­tive “con­ver­sa­tions,” keep in mind that tech­nol­ogy has to sup­port mes­sag­ing, and the core inter­ac­tiv­ity involved is no dif­fer­ent than that of reg­u­lar old embed­ded hyper­links.  Proper per­sua­sive plan­ning is still required.

In a restau­rant, clean bath­rooms por­tend clean kitchens, or so says the cliche.

Regard­less of how rea­son­able it is or isn’t, we instinc­tively attempt to con­firm a “brand promise” of atten­tion to detail in the kitchen by look­ing for evi­dence of it through­out the rest of the restaurant.

We believe in inter­nal con­sis­tency - a belief that’s hardly lim­ited to restaurants.

Clean Bath­rooms and Your Website’s UVP

“where should the Unique Value Propo­si­tion go on my Website?”

Peo­ple often ask me that, and — with the clean bath­room the­ory firmly in mind — I usu­ally reply with a ques­tion of my own: “where does the cho­rus or refrain go in a song?”

Some­times it comes off as a bit of a non-sequitur, but a lit­tle guided dis­cov­ery quickly estab­lishes the fol­low­ing points about song refrains:

1. The refrain car­ries the theme of the song.  Even when you can’t remem­ber the name of the song, you’ll usu­ally recall the refrain, because that’s the heart of the song
2. The rest of the song fleshes out, sub­stan­ti­ates, and sup­ports the refrain.  The stan­zas and the refrain are inti­mately connected.
3. The refrain is repeated over and over, and in the best songs, each rep­e­ti­tion gains mean­ing and emo­tional weight from the stan­zas that pre­ceded it.

To see how this works online, sim­ply sub­sti­tute “UVP” for “refrain” and “Web­site” for “song” and here’s what you get:

1. The UVP car­ries the theme of the Web­site.  In other words the rea­son vis­i­tors would want to do busi­ness with you should lie at the heart of your online mes­sag­ing.  If it’s not, you’re spend­ing too much time talk­ing about what you want to talk about rather than what’s impor­tant to the customer.
2. The rest of the Web­site should flesh out, sub­stan­ti­ate, and sup­port your UVP.  Peo­ple will look to see if you back-up what you claim. If the rest of your site doesn’t jibe with the UVP, you’ll lose cred­i­bil­ity and, ulti­mately, lose the sale.
3. The UVP is repeated over and over (though not ver­ba­tim or in entirety) from dif­fer­ent angles or per­spec­tives, such that the claims and promises gain weight, cred­i­bil­ity, and emo­tional res­o­nance with each click or page.

The Bot­tom Line:

Treat­ing your UVP as a song refrain helps to insure inter­nal consistency

It forces you to check your own site for clean bath­rooms.  So when vis­i­tors look to cor­rob­o­rate your claims by cross ref­er­enc­ing the var­i­ous ele­ments and pages of your Web­site, they’ll become increas­ingly reas­sured and con­fi­dent with each click.

For exam­ple, if you are a local con­trac­tor spe­cial­iz­ing in com­plet­ing base­ment ren­o­va­tions and garage enclo­sures in half the time of tra­di­tional con­trac­tors, your Web vis­i­tors will expect to see your claimed spe­cialty and value propo­si­tion reflected in your:

• prior work history,
• qualifications/certifications
• gallery of projects,
• guar­an­tees,
• tes­ti­mo­ni­als, etc.

If each of those ele­ments speaks to your spe­cial­ized focus and your half-the-time claims, you’ll win a lot more leads.  If they don’t sup­port your UVP, your vis­i­tors will likely go else­where for their renovations.

Also, if you claim to only hire the best, expect a fair amount of prospec­tive cus­tomers click­ing through your employ­ment pages to see what your REAL stan­dards of employ­ment are. And you bet­ter have “clean bath­rooms” because this ain’t the­ory, I’ve sat and watched vis­i­tors do exactly that via ana­lyt­ics and ser­vices such as Click Tales, OnTar­get, and Tea Leaf.

A Video­cast Full of Great “Clean Bath­room” Specifics for Websites

A great video-cast/discussion on this topic was cre­ated by my fel­low Wiz­ard of Ads Part­ner, Dave Young, when he dis­cusses the cred­i­bil­ity cues he inten­tion­ally baked into the Web­site for Roof Life of Ore­gon.

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Vid­dler video.

So go take a fresh look at your Web­site and ask yourself:

• Have you woven a refrain through­out your Website’s messaging?

• How does each page of your site work to sub­stan­ti­ate and cor­rob­o­rate your main claims/UVP?