Usable Words

As anyone who works on the web will tell you, there are two kinds of business website:

1. Websites built for their owners
2. Websites built for their customers

The first kind of website – the kind that goes on and on about how wonderful the business is, how revolutionary its products are, how many combined years of experience its partners have, how its showroom is the biggest in the Southern hemisphere, and how if that’s not impressive enough they also have this expensive piece of Flash animation to look at – is what Gerry McGovern calls “organisation-centric”. Absolutely everybody in the web industry thinks organisation-centric websites are bad. (Mysteriously, that hasn’t stopped them being built.)

We all agree, then, that the second kind of website – what McGovern calls “customer-centric” – is the good kind. Of course, it’s no surprise that usability experts like McGovern want websites to be customer-centric. But so, nowadays, do web marketers, designers, developers and copywriters.

So that’s that, then. We can get on with our jobs, confident that we all think our websites should be built to please customers, not owners. Who’s for a quick chorus of “Kumbayah”?

If only it were that simple.

There’s customer-centric and there’s customer-centric…

The thing is, saying a website should be “built for customers” can itself mean two different things:

1. The site should persuade customers to do what we want them to do.
2. The site should help customers to do what they came to do.

The first position is commonly held by sales and marketing professionals, the second by usability experts. Now, I don’t believe that either position is inherently right or wrong: the point is, they’re different.

Of course, “different” doesn’t always mean “incompatible”. In some cases, a sales or marketing objective can dovetail perfectly with a usability objective. Example: you visit Amazon to buy a book. The shopping cart makes it easy to do what you came to do. But at the same time, you’re fulfilling Amazon’s sales objective by handing over your credit card details. Bring out the guitars, it’s “Kumbayah” time!

But it’s not always that easy: sometimes, sales or marketing objectives and usability objectives interfere with each other.

When marketing and usability collide

Here’s an example: a bank wants to make it easy for customers to use its website for internet banking. But it also wants to “cross-sell” other products to those customers. It’s very, very hard to do the cross-selling without interfering with the usability of the internet banking. In the long term, the bank’s best bet – even from a marketing point of view – is to avoid annoying its customers at all costs. But because marketing tends to be driven by short-term objectives and measurable conversions, all too often the loyal customer will end up getting bombarded by pop-up ads.

Another example: as a professional gardener, you have some really valuable expert knowledge to offer website visitors. From a usability perspective, the best thing to do would be to just give all that knowledge away, no sign-ups, no hoops to jump through. But from a marketing perspective, you’re not a charity: at some point you want to make people subscribe to your newsletter before you give them any more goodies. This is a situation where it’s probably right to compromise usability for marketing reasons. (Naturally, you should still make the newsletter signup process as usable as possible.)

Find a balance

Every good website has a different balance between marketing and usability. The key point: don’t assume that just because your website is “customer-centric”, you’ll never have to choose between conflicting priorities. Finding the right balance only becomes easy when you’ve worked out what “customer-centric” means for you.

I couldn’t tell the difference between these two types of sheep’s milk yoghurt.

One was green. One was blue. But they both had the same list of ingredients and I couldn’t for the life of me work out why they were two different products.

So I bought neither.

This is the final post in my series on dealing with objections in web content. The first two are here and here.

The story so far: We’ve established that, for any objection that might potentially get in the way of a person’s decision to buy your product and service, there are three broad types of objector: explicit objectors (those who have the objection and will voice it), latent objectors (those who have the objection, at least at some level, but won’t voice it), and non-objectors (those who don’t have the objection at all).

We then went further and divided each of these three categories of objector into a further three subcategories. And we finished the last post by saying that the way to deal with all these different types of objector is not to try to write something that will please everybody. So what do you do instead?

How to deal with multiple types of objector

I could deal with this topic at very great length (well, OK, I could deal with most topics at very great length) but I’m going to boil it down to five steps:

1. Think about the audience for this specific piece of writing.
2. Try to work out approximately what proportion of this audience will fit into each category of objector.
3. Work out how much impact answering the objection will have for each category.
4. Write your copy for the category of objector that looks most important taking both Steps 2 and 3 into account.
5. If you get the chance to address other categories implicitly, go for it.

So let’s take each of these in turn. read more >

When a potential customer is in a desperate situation, you need to let them know you can help.

Clearly.

And quickly.

If you can be the first person they hear this from, they become the easiest kind of person to convert into an actual customer. They won’t compare you to your competitors. They won’t baulk at the ridiculous price you charge for an emergency service. They just want the pain to go away.

…OK, all that’s pretty much common sense, right? But if it’s common-sense advice, why don’t people build their websites around it?

Here’s an example. I’ve been working with this one client. Let’s just say they’re a dentist. (They’re not a dentist. But I don’t want their competitors Googling this post and stealing my common-sense advice amazing copywriting secrets, and for my purposes they’re a bit like a dentist, so let’s pretend.)

Now, dentists have two kinds of customers. Well, more than two, but permit me to simplify. They have the kind of customer who can make an appointment in a week’s or a month’s time – the kind who is obediently attending their six-monthly checkup, or having their teeth whitened, or whatever.

Then there’s the kind of customer who needs an appointment right now. This customer has a toothache, and will pay absolutely anything to make it go away.

Well, here’s what I found when I looked at my client’s competitors’ websites: all of these “dentists” have an emergency service. They will actually come out to your place 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and fix your toothache. (If only real dentists did that!)

But none of them – at least none of the ones I looked at – so much as mentions this service on their home page! Instead, the home pages were all (the equivalent of) “porcelain veneers this” and “gold fillings that” – services that are money-spinners for the dentists, sure, but not services you want to have to scroll through when you are in screaming agony and just want to know if someone can help.

So, my advice to the client? “Mention your emergency service in big letters right at the top of your home page. Put it in your meta description too. Give people your phone number, and tell them to call you any time. That way, when someone with a horrible toothache Googles up a dentist, they’ll immediately know you want to hear from them. (SEO permitting, of course.)”

Turns out this client’s web developer had already suggested the same thing (smart fellow!), so I can’t actually take credit for the idea, but that doesn’t matter. A good idea is a good idea. Of course, it might mean these clients get a lot more calls at 3 in the morning from desperate people, but they assure me they’re up for that!

[Update: And here, courtesy of my email inbox, is an actual dentist who definitely gets it.]

Image: trialsanderrors

Imagine you’re launching a new clock radio. Clock radios are a rather boring item (apologies to fans and collectors), so you’re racking your brains to think of something your product can do that will excite people. Then you hit on it: there’s this button you can press that will turn off the alarm and it will turn itself back on nine minutes later! It’s like magic!  Is that cool or what?

You’ve read Copyblogger enough to know that you need to sell benefits, not features, so you carefully craft a benefit statement for your snooze button that cleverly leverages a pain point or an emotional hot-button. “Give Mondayitis the flick!”, maybe. Or “Catch an extra few minutes of precious sleep…and still make your 9 o’clock meeting!”

You’re pretty pleased with yourself. You plaster your new tagline all over your website and your promotional materials, sit back and wait for the sales. And they don’t come.

The reason is hopefully obvious. Every single clock radio on the market has a snooze button. Snooze buttons were probably really groovy when they were first invented (their inventor is no doubt either very rich, or cursing him/herself about not taking out a patent). But nowadays, you’d no more be surprised to see a big button on a clock radio that you can press to make the alarm go away for nine minutes (why is it always nine minutes, incidentally?) than you would to see a handle on a saucepan.

This might all seem very self-evident, but it’s amazing how many businesses – large and small – are out there selling the snooze button. From airlines selling the generic benefits of plane travel, to work-from-home financial planners offering to “grow your wealth with a comprehensive range of investment services”, these businesses are doing some great pro bono PR for their industries, but totally failing to explain why customers should choose them over their competitors.

What you need to do instead is sell that nifty iPod dock that you’ve just added to your line of clock radios. Well, actually you needed to do that five years ago; iPod docks on clock radios are the new snooze button! But you get the idea. Work out what you’re doing that nobody else is, and sell that.

Image: seanmcgrath

Here are three recent blog posts that I highly recommend you read right now:

• SEO Copywriting – You Can’t Make a Silk Purse Out of a Sow’s Ear. She’s right, you know. You can’t.
• Copyblogger – Warning: Narcissistic Marketing Can Be Dangerous to Your Business Health. Actually, I probably need to read this more than you do.
• IttyBiz – The Only Thing You Need to Know About Copywriting and Conversions. Of course, if that was literally true, you’d never have to read my blog again. I don’t suggest you stop reading my blog. I do suggest you start reading IttyBiz.