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.

Negative Reviews is a post from: Jeff Sexton Writes

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.

And The Winner Is… is a post from: Jeff Sexton Writes

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.

Crutchfield Adds $75 to the Pot! is a post from: Jeff Sexton Writes

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!

Crutchfield Conversion Challenge: Don’t Make Me Doubt! is a post from: Jeff Sexton Writes

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?

Has Seth Oversimplified This? is a post from: Jeff Sexton Writes

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Eloqua’s Must See Video is a post from: Jeff Sexton Writes

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.

Click here to view the embedded 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?

The Clean Bathroom Approach to Online Persuasion is a post from: Jeff Sexton Writes