Jonothan Stribling

Building something truly useful is a fantasy for most designers, entrepreneurs, and product people. Most will build something that is a reasonable copy of something truly useful and along the way convince themselves that it is gonna be great, that the folks are gonna love it.

The truth is that there are very few transformative tools with a genuine utility. Transformative products create a new space for utility by solving a problem that we didn’t know we had. Twitter, Facebook, Google,  Get Satisfaction, Amazon’s EC2, Amazon are just a few businesses that have become an integral part of our lives by being good utilitarians.

Utilitarianism, the moral framework and philosophy championed by John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Beckham, is a useful way of understanding digital product development in a kind of steam punk way. Mill wrote in Utilitarianism:

Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.

When thinking about building experiences and tools for people what better focus is there than making people happy. For a product to be huge, entrepreneurs, designers and developers need to consider how their decisions will impact their users and if their choices will promote happiness or unhappiness.

Whilst I am no great fan of Bentham, preferring a more relativist view of the world, I think that as a simplistic approach to my continuing project to combine philosophy with online marketing in under 500 words, utilitarianism should be the tool of choice for the product developers amongst us.

It’s dark in the bar, some nice beats are playing, the lights hit your Grey Goose vodka and tonic, and make the ice cubes sparkle.

You’re out for some fun.

You are also a little drunk and strike up a drunken conversation about Proust with someone who seems flirty, fun, and sexy. It’s going great. So great that you end up at their place for a night of fun.

Two weeks later you’ve forgotten their name.

The one night stand is a moment of hedonism later tempered by a sober reality (and sometimes guilt).

What if you met the person you were going to marry? Suddenly it seems a little less hedonistic and more romantic.

In the urgency of getting a conversion on a website it is easy to forget the type of relationship the buyer is looking for. Some buyers are looking for a quickie, an instant gratification of a transactional urge. Others are looking for a partner, someone they can build a relationship with based on mutual respect and trust.

One of the most important lessons I learnt from the most excellent Eisenbergs was the difference in buyer behaviour between transactional and relational buyers.

Transactional buyers are looking to satisfy an instant urge, they:

• Are satisfying an immediate need
• Are looking for a one time purchase
• Are more concerned with price and value
• May know exactly what they want
• Can be induced more easily with special offers
• Want to complete their purchase quickly
• Are more likely to buy on a first time visit

Some examples of transactional products are consumables, books, cds, ebooks, clothing, gifts and so on.

Relational buyers are looking for someone they can trust and go to for help over time, they:

• Are more concerned about testimonials and reputation
• Will take longer to complete their purchase
• Will want to know about support
• Might spend more time evaluating their options
• Will want to know more about the product or service
• Will have a strategic, considered reason for the purchase
• Are less concerned about price

Whilst the buyer type is informed by the product or service, it might also change based on the knowledge or skills of the buyer. An uninformed buyer new to buying online will behave like a relational buyer for their first purchase.

If you are selling a relational type product in a transactional way without success it might be time to consider that you’re asking the future love of your life for a quickie when they don’t yet know they love you. You need to build the sparkle by delighting and surprising them.

Rather than going in for the kill, build your list of prospects by offering information that builds trust. EBooks, information packs, free trials, free consultations can all work well.

Once the relationship is established, the buyer will think favourably about you when they are ready to buy.

You can also build your landing pages to expect repeat visits by allowing people to save items to view later, favourite items, and display content based on previous behaviour.

Thinking about how people purchase your product and service and use it is the key to working out which buyer type you should be focusing on. Tim Ash calls this the behavioural model and I have found it useful to distinguish between buyer types and then optimise landing pages and buying experiences.

So if you’re not having any luck getting picked up give your website a make over and get lucky for a night or for life.

Years ago, I read somewhere that 42% of people abandon a shopping cart due to slow performance.

Recently it was proven to me that this might indeed be true which is surprising because most statistical factoids are garbage.

After introducing a content delivery network service into an ecommerce site I saw a 20% gain in cart conversion. This was a pretty stunning result and it made me think about all the off-page conversion factors that can have a big influence on visit conversion that might be ignored because of a focus on design and copy.

The standard approach to conversion optimisation requires a really tight focus on the value proposition and the customer. Tests are designed to:

• Make sure there is a clear message
• Make sure the page is relevant to the audience
• Drive urgency
• Reduce buying inhibitors and friction

In the excitement of lovingly crafting your website into a conversion machine it is easy to focus on the design and content of the page or site at the expense of more fundamental issues. After all, it is a lot of fun changing forms, tightening copy and call-to-actions, optimising paid search ads, and adding great product images.

But, there could be some factors inhibiting buyers which have nothing to do with design and copy. Some of these are operating like a silent do not buy signal to buyers, creating friction and making sure they bounce off your website and off to your competitor.

Some off-page conversion factors to look at are:

Speed
Is your website hosted at a $2.95 unlimited host that slows down with rush hour? Or your customers might be in New Zealand but your website is hosted in USA and is slow.

Buyers today are lazy and expect speed. A slow website signals a lack of trust to impatient buyers.

The answer might be to move your website and pay a little more for hosting, or have your web developer optimise your code to speed it up.

Security and privacy
It is ironic that people add their entire life to Facebook but may be concerned about providing email address.

Using an SSL certificate and having a good privacy policy can help you address concerns about trust and privacy and keep your buyers happy.

Your domain name
The domain name is one of the most important parts of your whole buying experience.

Research by McAfee shows that some domain spaces are not as trusted as others. Some country code domains like .ru and .no might be seen as dodgy by customers from another region. A cheap space like .info (I know, I know) might not be instantly recognisable and create some friction for the buyer. Choose a widely known domain space and a good domain name that reflects your brand.

Get off the page to get your conversion off the hook!

You see them everywhere – people with their heads down, supplicant hands, silent, staring at a mobile device.

They are praying to the god of the Internet, requesting that the pipes and bytes entertain them, illuminate them and placate the boredom of being alive.

Between 9pm and midnight around the world, the TV sits mute while people hover around the LCD monitor watching a rerun on hulu, or a cat doing backflips whilst wearing a tutu on YouTube.

The Internet has simultaneously gone prime-time and become mobile and this is changing what people expect from their online experiences regardless of a sedentary or nomadic pattern of use. People expect to be entertained, engaged, informed, outraged and delighted from their online experiences. This has implications for online and offline retailers, publishers, bloggers, designers and online marketers.

Everyone needs to be a little more entertaining. Users expect it and businesses creating the best, most entertaining content will win regardless of industry.

Bryan Eisenberg talks about persuasion architecture, I think we should start talking about entertainment experience or lolcats architecture.

I don’t need to be persuaded or cajoled. I just need to be your friend and think that you’re the cleverest, the funniest, the fastest, the most innovative, or the toughest.

Relationships might originate in Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and finish with a purchase being made via a mobile site over a few drinks.

Or a work type relationship with your insurance company might evolve into a casual laugh over madcap YouTube accident videos. CGU are running a pretty good campaign featuring a dancing bricklayer that they are promoting in Facebook.

Seek.com have embraced entertainment commerce offering cute games that are promoted by their job seeker emails.

Google were a very early adopter with their logo memes now widely chattered about and promoted by people.

Zynga have built a billion dollar empire soley on entertaining kids and teaching about raising barns.

Moosejaw, an outdoors brand, made people laugh lots with their break up service that was featured in YouTube.

As the Internet evolves to become an intricate part of people’s social and personal lives, brands need to be smarter at how they reach their buyers.

If the 2000s were all about getting direct response campaigns right in search engines, then the 2010s will be about getting the entertainment experience right and driving new customers to your online door.

When you’re one of the cool kids, it is pretty easy to forget that not everyone is in the cool club.

In fact, some people are so far removed from the cool club that they haven’t heard of Twitter, social media, ecommerce, WordPress, Android, the Nexus 1, or the RunKeeper iPhone application.

But generally, every human living in an advanced economy who can read has heard of Google and Facebook.

We’re so connected these days that it is easy to forget that there are a bunch of people who are not connected; who are yet to realise the liberating potential of the Internet.

And they know it. They know that no one uses the big yellow book to find a glazier or carpet cleaner. They know that their kids are doing things online that they might enjoy, that might make simple stuff easier but they haven’t made their move yet.

They are scared, intimidated and worried about looking stupid.

And all the cool kids reckon they are “stupid”. That’s why they are cool and not stupid, they are good at trying new stuff, seeing trends, labelling stuff.

Nothing online scares them. Except comic sans, fuscia backgrounds and being marketed to.

To me users should never be thought of as stupid. Rather, it is the marketers, designers and developers who make them feel stupid who are, well, stupid.

So many conversations in the tech, social, online communities concern the known world of tech, social and online.

It strikes me that it is a bubble where the people listening are the same people talking who are the same people publishing aphoristic thought bombs who are the same people reading the aphoristic thought bombs who are the same people thinking of the next aphoristic thought bomb.

It is exhausting, and to a complete outsider completely meaningless and uninteresting.

And because the same people are building the tools and selling the tools and dreaming up the next tools, the kids not part of the cool club are forgotten.

They are left to find their own way with poorly written copy, small fonts, poor documentation, badly handled errors, and unclear instructions.

And for anyone running an ecommerce site, a blog dependent on advertising, a remarketing program, or an online community dependent on user engagement and re-engagement this is not good for business.

Whilst Australia has high number of Internet and mobile users, future growth will come from people changing their habits and behaviours. This means they will go online, start booking stuff and buying online, connecting with friends online.

It is up to the people working to build online experiences on Internet devices to make this journey as easy as possible and remind all users that it is never the user, it is always the tool.

This means talking to people who you might not talk to often to find out how they use the Internet and if not why not.

This means looking outside the closed network for cool kids and digital hipsters to identify wants, needs, desires, fears and anxieties.

It means making sure that your website works for them and meets their needs.

It means having a presence in Google and Facebook which are two of the most common first steps online for a new user.
It means giving a voice to some members of the community who need it most by showing them how to setup a blog and start publishing.

The promise of the Internet and web 2.0 is social transformation for the better and we need to strive to make sure this promise can be delivered.

The other day my “portable phone” started to drop out mid conversation frustrating myself, my wife and our callers.

What’s a portable phone you ask? Well it’s what I call a cordless phone. Maybe I’m strange, but that’s the thing about language – there are many different ways to describe an object. I was a bit out on a limb with “portable phone” but I should have been able to complete my task quickly and easily regardless of my long-tail key phrase.

Sadly it was not so. Choosing and buying my portable phone was difficult.

I was looking for a portable phone with an attached answering machine so I don’t have to pay for the Telstra service.

I should state that I am a spontaneous buyer type. I like to get it over and done with quickly and find comparison shopping very very boring.

I am probably one of the easiest buyer types to cater for, which is why the problems I experienced concerned me. If online retail is to grow in Australia, ecommerce sites need to do better. It is as simple as that.

It should have been easy…

My broken phone was bought the old fashioned way from a Telstra shop, so I could have gone there first, but I thought I would compare some alternatives. Of course I “Googled it”, entering the keyphrase “portable phone”.

Scanning the entries I spied an ad for Deals Direct and remembered I had heard the founder talk at a fairly lame seminar about Asian trade so I thought I would check it out.

The result was a letdown. The landing page had a list of totally unrelated items. I used the site search and searched for “portable phone” elliciting the same result. No good.

Where are the portable phones?

After I clicked on a few site categories it dawned on me that normal humans call portable phones, cordless phones.

After searching for “cordless phone” I got the results I wanted.

Making a choice wasn’t wasy though. In fact I was overwhelmed with choice. How could I distinguish between the generic Chinese crap and the good Chinese stuff? Did I need to?

After viewing a couple of brands I decided to visit Telstra, select a reliable model and then price compare. Great strategy!

Finding the phone on the Telstra site was easy. There was a small selection and a useful compare tool.As I was getting bored with shopping (being a spontaneous buyer) I decided just to buy it from Telstra.

The shopping cart was straightforward and easy to use. When I got to the payment page I dashed off to get my wallet and was distracted by the baby and dinner. Forty five minutes later I returned to my laptop and entered my credit card details only to receive a message telling me that my account and cart session had timed-out and for security reasons both had been deleted.

This was not the error I received. I got this while trying to repeat the purchase. I thought I would use this as an another example of how not to handle error messages in online retail.

I was shocked and dismayed!

How the hell did that help me?

If you are going to time-out my login session then at least keep the cart intact for me. To clear both with some vague message about security is both arrogent and annoying. The implication is “It’s for your own good, and don’t worry, you’re probably too dumb to understand”

Needless to say I elected not to purchase with Telstra. I repeated my search, this time searching for “cordless phone” and ended up purchasing a cheap phone from oo.com.au.

Lessons

So what went wrong?

• Deals Direct need to target long-tail key phrases in their internal search engine and also in organic and paid search;
• They should also customise landing pages so they are based on the search terms. This should of course include relevant long-tail key phrases. Doing so will stop buyers hunting around to see if they’re in the right place. I bet the current landing pages have a high bounce rate for certain key phrases. Making them more targeted would reduce the bounce and increase buyer conversion.
• Deals Direct should consider creating buyer guides and product comparisons so more meticulous buyer types can be sure they are buying the right products. The reviews would benefit by being more “findable”.
• Telstra need to remember that humans are flesh and blood, complex creatures with a varied set of wants and needs. Humans do not follow a nice linear path when purchasing stuff and ecommerce websites need to expect this.  Login session timeouts should not kill the cart!
• Telstra need to work on their error messages and have a user experience expert look over them. Perhaps even usability test the errors. A buyer needs to know: What happened; What they can do to fix it or when it will be fixed. Adding a phone number, chat or click-to-call to all error messages is a nice way of addressing buyer concerns and turning a poor experience into a great one.

There has been an explosion of investment in online retail in Australia recently with many major big box retailers having releasing new websites. Continual optimisation is required to make sure that investors get a good return on their investment, buyers have a positive experience and technology laggards are convinced that shopping online is secure and easy.

The good news is that my new portable phone works very well

When I was in Romania about 10 years ago I had some drinks with a local Optician and a Romanian rock star. We enjoyed many drinks and Raresh, the Optician, invited my girlfriend and I back to his apartment after the bar closed.

Raresh lived in a Soviet style apartment that was very very clean. It was disturbingly ordered. All that was missing ware the plastic sheets to protect the furniture.

He hated Romania and his low socio-economic status. He declaimed “I hate my country!” and told the rock star that he wished he has his life.

The life of an Optician was not a comfortable middle-class life in Romania. It was a life of struggle and worry.

As a result Raresh hung out in the bar where we met him.

The man did know about taxonomies though. He asked us if we wanted to listen to some music and handed us a collection of exercise books that contained a hand-written index of his collection. It was a magnificent thing and Raresh’s logical ordered mind was wonderfully evident in the careful scrawls of music from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Each entry contained a code which mapped to a tape in his collection. It was better ordered than my Ipod. And by hand!

The desire to organise and classify is a uniquely human activity. Imposing systems on a chaotic world makes us feel like we’re in control, that we’re managing to keep our heads above the water that threatens to drown us in a beautifully fluid and disorganised way.

It is also how we expect to find stuff on the Internet.

We visit a website looking for a trace, a scent of something that relates to our need. Clothing, shoes, belts, books, musical devices, portable storage devices. Each might relate to something that we’re looking for, something that makes us think “yeah, that’s it”. And then we click a link and somewhere someone pours a Gin and Tonic happy that there’s been a micro-conversion.

Finding the right words to describe the right stuff or the right actions is the key to conversion.

The great thing about Google’s AdWords is that it reduces all the fluff and bubble of the creative process to a headline, 2 descriptions and a display URL. No pictures, no logos, no pictures of babies smiling coyly at the camera; just good old fashioned words.

The only tricks you can play are with words and the right words can deliver lots of clicks.

Too often people get obsessed with the glitz and forget the words that order the chaotic disorganised world of their buyer.

I reckon start with the words and add the sparkle later. Test the words in AdWords or Yahoo. Test them on your customers.

Like Raresh, build a beautiful framework to structure the world of your buyer.

Raresh wasn’t distracted by the colourful tape cases, they were kept hidden until his visitor had made a choice.

I like to think that Raresh is happily married now with kids and a business thriving as the Romanian economy improves.

He deserves it.

There is a sense of pervading gloom in the air. We’ve read about it in the papers, we’ve watched it on the teeve and we’ve read about it online.

The consensus appears to be that we’re all doomed. That’s right doomed!

The easy credit of the 2000′s has dried up. Consumers are reigning in their spending on stupid luxury items and selling their boats, jetskiis, motorbikes and SUV’s. The repo man is very very busy.

This miasma of gloom makes it very hard to sell some stuff and persuade people that they need a particular product or service.

Regardless
there is a way to successfully market to panic stricken consumers and close-minded businesses during a recession.

And that is by focusing on the positive.

With so much doom, gloom and negativity about, folks do not respond well to fear, uncertainty and doubt marketing. What they need is some positivity, something that can help them stare bleakly from these dark times into a bright shining future.

That’s why the new Foxtel campaign works so well. It speaks to the heart of the matter. Yes there is a recession but a solution is offered in a light-hearted way – being entertained by Foxtel.

There is also another recession proof way to market your business and that is to offer great value. McDonalds and Coles have been doing this very well.

The truth is that there are still people with money and there are still businesses spending money. There is however considerable friction in the buying process about the future. For a conversion to occur marketers need to extra hard to reduce the friction generated by an uncertain future.

So focus on the positive and value. Paint a picture where a buyer can see herself buying an investment property, taking a European holiday, buying a jet-skii or simply not worrying about money and paying the bills.

I live in a beautiful place on the edge of the city. We’re on the edge of a forest and have a view out west over the city and to the You Yangs and the ocean beyond. Unfortunately it is also an area prone to bush fires.

We have only been there a short time and this summer have evacuated 3 times. A guy I met last night has been there a month and evacuated 3 times.

This is the reality of living in such a beautiful spot in the Australian bush. A worthy sacrifice for not living in the inner city or the bleak homogeneous suburbs.

To cope with the threat of bush fire the community has evolved networks to assist people be informed of any fires and be given time to flee or fight. This network is called the Phone Tree or Fire Tree and consists of a number of branches of residents who call each other after being informed of a threat. The tree is headed by a monitor who listens to the CFA scanner and ABC radio, and looks for dangerous weather patterns.

The tree sometimes breaks down when people are not contactable which causes some angst and frustration.

Listening to the members of the tree debate different methods for strengthening the branches it struck me that the sophistication of any technological solutions are only as good as the technical competance of the members of the community. Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are not, by themselves, a solution. SMS is not a solution. Some people do not have mobiles, some have bad reception and in the case of a crisis the network may be overloaded.

What is needed is a set of technologies appropriate for all members of the community. The early adopters, the early majority, the late majority and the luddites. No member should be penalised for not being on Twitter or having a mobile.

I do think there is an interesting solution to this problem that utilises a set of technologies with a broad reach.

Solving this problem is kind of like solving a conversion problem. There is a community or set of buyers each with a different persona, different needs wants and ideas. The job of the marketer is to persuade each member of the community to engage and to get some benefit from our product and service.

As relatively fearless adopters of new technology it is easy to leave a few behind, because “they don’t get it”. Our job needs to be to treat each buyer as an important member of our community. We owe them the respect of understanding their needs and concerns so we can address them and make them happy.

It may not be as urgent as ensuring your neighbours safety during a bushfire but it is bloody important to your bottom line.