…and apply what you learn to your website

There are loads of things you can do to optimise your website for visitors. But are you missing a trick?

Making assumptions is one thing. It’s also useful to think creatively about persuading people to buy.  

How? Here’s a simple exercise that’ll help you pin down unforseen ways to enhance your visitors’ experience and boost sales. 

• Every time you buy from a site you haven’t used before, make a note of the main reason you chose that site over the others you looked at
• At the same time jot down the main reason why you didn’t buy from the other sites you visited 

You’ll find, like all of us, that you respond well to solid practical stuff like great copy, clear navigation, good value, a choice of ways to pay, sensible layout etcetera. But you might also find yourself responding positively to things you didn’t expect and couldn’t have predicted. 

Eventually patterns will emerge. Persuade friends, family and colleagues to join in and you’ll have a healthy bank of data, potentially sprinkled with nuggets of sales conversion gold. Then apply what you’ve learned to your site and see if sales increase.

• The golden rule of marketing is – give your customers what they want
• The golden rule of targeting is – go where your customers go

Perfect. If you’d like to get a regular email from Drayton, each packed to the rafters with the best in direct response wisdom, just register on his home page here.

…and they’ll find it almost impossible to decide!

Last year New Scientist featured research proving how difficult it was for more than eight people to reach consensus. 

Apparently fewer than eight people can make decisions relatively efficiently and effectively. But the moment you hit eight things go dog-shaped.  

It makes sense to me. In the olden days when I was a financial services direct marketer, getting copy approval from big blue chip insurance clients was always a complete nightmare. 

Because copy and creative had to go through multiple departments and individuals for approval – invariably more than eight - we’d get trapped in a horrible Groundhog Day scenario. Every time us marketers thought we could go to print it’d embark on another spontaneous round of the same people and departments, all of whom felt they had to approve their colleagues’ approvals.  

OK, the campaign would eventually be approved. But the copy was almost always reduced either to gobbledegook or something so bland you might as well have sent wallpaper.   

Remember Kyoto, and more recently Copenhagen? In retrospect it seems naive to expect consensus from more than 100 heads of state…  

Conclusion: if you want solid, sensible consensus decisions that’ll benefit your business, don’t involve more than seven people in making them! 

Terms & Conditions can be a genuine force for commercial good… as long as they’re written with your customers in mind.

T&C are almost always legal gobbledegook, often lifted wholesale from a template. From a communications perspective they’re criminally poor.  

Which is a shame. Every communication is an opportunity to promote your business. In a world packed solid with dodgy dealers, positive, honest, transparent Terms & Conditions can be powerful marketing magic. 

The thing is, most lawyers would probably advise you to leave your T&C well alone. The solution? 

• provide a plain language version of your T&C for people to read in tandem before signing up to the legal version. Say something like: Because our Terms & Conditions are legally binding, they’re difficult to understand. We think it’s nice to know what’s what, so here’s a plain English version. 

or  

• summarise each term and condition in plain English above or below the legalese. Say something like:  Because our Terms & Conditions are legally binding, they’re difficult to understand. We think it’s nice to know what’s what, so we’ve summarised each section in plain English.

or

• Take the view that your T&C are a formality. Some terms and conditions are just common sense written in legalese. For example when you join a forum it is usually a condition that you don’t swear at your fellow members. There’s absolutely no need for simple concepts like good manners to be expressed in legalese.   

or

• If you’re 100% risk averse, say what the hell and get a good copywriter to create a palatable document that means the same as the legalese – but communicates it properly. 

It is best to avoid caveats altogether. Why?

• caveats interfere with your sales proposition
• reading is a challenge because your flow is constantly interrupted by irritating little swords and asterisks
• caveats make you sound negative
• and, contrarily, they make you seem less trustworthy

Is it possible to avoid caveats altogether?

Yes. It’s easy. Turn them into positives instead. Make them earn their keep. Here’s an example.

• Replace the caveat *Offer valid for  a limited time only with a sentence  in your body copy, loud and proud: Hurry, this great offer won’t be around for ever!

What if you can’t make a caveat positive?

There’s always a positive side. If there genuinely isn’t, think about making people a decent offer that’s worth accepting.  

What if you can’t bear to clear out the caveats?

Put them all in your Terms & Conditions or Agreement, where they’ll work their hardest to reassure people rather than scaring them off.  

Customer testimonials. Useful, right?

More useful than you might think! Here’s five top ways to make the most of testimonials.

1. Use a testimonal to introduce every web page, like this, and they’ll give your sales message a powerful little boost

• Header:  You deserve a brilliantly clean home!
• Subhead:  Brighton’s favourite cleaning company
• Testimonial: “I’ve used BrightInBrighton for a year now and they’ve never let me down. My home is always absolutely spotless!” 
• Body copy: BrightInBrighton deliver superb quality cleaning services (etc)

2. Use several short testimonials on your sales page, where they’ll work hard to increase conversion

3. Create a dedicated testimonial page and add new praise regularly. You’ll benefit from SEO juice, enhanced visitor interest and valuable extra credibility

4. Use a short testimonial to lend power to your email marketing campaign – we all enjoy knowing what other people think and we like to trust our fellow consumers

5. Include testimonials with the stuff you sell and hammer your quality message home. They’ll help you encourage repeat visits, increase sales, cross sales and up-sales…

• on the cover of your ebook
• designed into your product’s packaging
• printed on delivery notes
• etc 

6. Create a regular ‘what our customers say’ section in your newsletter. It’s a good place to display longer testimonials and entire letters full of praise without interfering with your core sales message. People like to read about their peers’ experiences and good news helps create a positive, trusted brand

PS. Dont forget you can use testimonials from peers and experts within your field as well as customers.  

Add a ’status’ line to your home page – a bit like Facebook – and you can update your website in seconds every morning.

Just add a simple line of code, like I’ve done on my freelance copywriter website helpinthecity.com. 

Why? From a SEO perspective updating your site regularly encourages extra visits by Google etc. It tells them you’re alive and kicking. But a status line can be a powerful little direct marketing tool too. It is a beautifully easy way to:

• tell visitors exactly what you’re doing every day – evidence that you’re present, correct and waiting for their custom!
• announce news via a prominent, powerful one liner
• inform people about new stock, new products, special offers…
• reinforce your brand by consolidating your website’s tone of voice – cheap, cheerful and effective brand building
• give visitors an extra insight into your business’s personality
• differentiate yourself from competitors
• encourage people to come back every day to see what you’re up to
• deliver cross-sell and up-sell messages
• let people know when you’re on holiday, useful if you’re a one man band!
• prompt response by asking a daily question
• make one off and time-limited offers – for one hour only etc… a great way to win repeat visits

That’s just a quick off the cuff list. Test drive a status line on your website’s home page, monitor your stats carefully and see what it does for your business.

What is the inverted pyramid method? Ask any journalist. All it involves is putting your information in priority order. Putting crucial information at the top, less important material further down.

What’s ‘important’? It depends whether you want the reader to buy, make an offer, answer a question, join something, subscribe or respond in another way. For online work, you’ll probably want to use your keywords in order of importance. 

Whatever you want from them, give readers and search engines key information in an order that will: 

• let people know immediately that they’re in the right place 
• inspire them to start reading
• keep them reading
• drive them towards your goal in a logical, methodical way
• let search engines know what keywords they should treat as priority when ranking the page

Here’s an example

• Strong header including core proposition: Buy the cheapest copralites on the internet here – limited offer!
• First priority: We supply the best quality, cheapest copralites available anywhere online
• Second: Buy before the year 3000 and we’ll give you a 1000% discount
• Third: Here’s our copralite range. Aren’t they gorgeous!
• Fourth: This is how you buy
• Fifth: Buy now… click here
• Sixth: Copralite safety issues
• Seventh: Ask us a copralite question and we’ll get right back to you
• Eighth: legal / regulatory stuff

Grab tiny but crucial marketing opportunities – small can be beautiful!

Earlier this year our local hotel launched their summer menu. The chalkboard sign outside – which faces thousands of cars stuck conveniently at traffic lights 24/7 – said:

New Summer Evening Food Menu Available Inside At Weekends.

Which says it like it is. But limited space needn’t mean boring. If you only have nine words to play with, make them tasty ones.

Three nine word alternatives: 

• Hot? Tired? Hungry? Lovely fresh summer food all weekend! 
• Delicious, freshly cooked summer food for hazy, lazy weekends!
• Eat, drink and be merry! Fresh summer weekend food

The same goes for online marketing. Most directories allow only a handful of words for business descriptions. Which is fair enough: the idea is for visitors (and search engines) to see at a glance whether the site described contains what they want without having to wade through miles of text.

Building a micro-masterpiece, including a suitable key phrase, is one more small way to give your website a positive boost.

Life’s never straightforward.

You’ve filled your website with well written, entertaining, inspiring, key word rich copy. It is easy to navigate and the content’s laid out perfectly for scan-reading. You’ve built links ’til you’re blue in the face.

You’ve dragged your business painstakingly on to page one of Google with natural SEO. And your products are unbeatable. 

But you can’t account for people’s quirks. Here are three recent examples of completely irrational buying decisions:

• I won a new customer recently because she liked the fact that we share the same surname
• a client of mine won his latest project because his business has the same name as his new customer’s house
• Today I chose an online organic gardening shop because I loved the colours they used on-

All three circumstances had something fundamental in common. Each resonated on a deeply personal level, striking an unexpected chord of familiarity in the prospective buyer.

When there are loads of similar options to choose from many people, whether they realise it or not, will hang their buying decision on an emotional response. At best this is flimsy reasoning but the pull of gut-level familiarity – that shock of recognition – is incredibly potent.

Brand builders all over the planet would kill for a way to tap into people’s quirks. As would freelance copywriters like me.

In the absence of mind reading skills, we plod along the best we can!