Non-Line Blogging

I don’t get much chance to talk about Danish thinkers but maybe we can learn something about running our businesses more effectively from a couple of them, so here goes...

I blew the dust off my copy of Jakob Nielsen’s Prioritizing Web Usability and, as usual, I have been reminded of lots of vital design principles.  There are a few books that I dig into on a regular basis simply because I seem to take away different business benefits depending what I’m obsessing about with clients at the time:  I have been doing a lot of work on a web site re-design and so was lapping up all the lovely stuff about page load times, content above the fold, and aiming for readable fonts not font size rules (more of that in another blog soon).

I know that Danish Jakob has his detractors who say that he dogmatically insists on fast page load times in a world of fast internet and even faster browsers (have you tried Google Chrome yet?).  However, most of what he says is good common digital sense and all the other usability folk tend to concur with his principles, If nothing else it re-assures us that common-sense design principles have been validated by people like Jakob and in Steve Krug's excellent Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability 

Anyway, whilst thinking about Denmark’s contribution to digital thinking I was reminded that Soren Kierkegaard, an 18^th century Danish philosopher, came up with an interesting view...

“Life is lived forward but understood backward”

So indulge me whilst I attempt a “Danish web usability and philosophy mash-up”: Jakob is an advocate of the “iterative web site design processes” and believes that you need to try things, review them and improve them otherwise you will not get anywhere.   In the testosterone-fuelled world of 21^st century digital marketing this is now called “rapid iterative design” and comes complete with its own intense seminar programme...

Kierkegaard, were he alive today, may suggest that only by delivering different web experiences will you learn which ones work best, so the Danes, 100 years apart concur on the best way to deliver business results.

But the Great Danes are not the only ones who ascribe to the "live life forward" approach:  The evergreen Jim Sterne coined the rather jaunty “TIMITI” (Try It, Measure It, Tweak It) model many years ago and is still a great believer of testing, measuring and optimising.  In my digital marketing training courses I regularly flash up a quote from John Caples from way back in 1932 who said:

“In planning an advertising campaign the first step should be to clear the decks of all opinions.  The next step should be to find a scientific method of testing”

So maybe the answer to all digital success lies in the work of Kierkegaard.  We could even link his "live life forward but understand it backwards" to the "aggregation of marginal gains" concept to deliver a new philosophy for digital marketing.  For the record, Kierkegaard was not a marketer and would probably not have made a great web-master. Apart from his “Live life forward” quote his next best soundbite, referring to the inaccessible nature of most of his writings, seems to have been:

“The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted”

Funnily enough, there are a few sites out there that seem to design by that philosophy and so maybe he could have cut it as a web master after all.

Even if you consider yourself a bit of a wordsmith the intenet is a pretty unforgiving place and will not tolerate excessive words.  Make web pages "appear" easily laid out to guide people through the content, obsess about every one of your 95 characters in Google AdWords, and ensure that your email subject lines persuade in less than about 80 characters (and don't waste 18 of them with "October Newsletter" either!)

In case anybody else is grappling with the same problem this appropriately brief post gives you some inspiration from others who have tried...

I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.  Blaise Pascal

Omit Needless Words.  William Strunk 1918

Omit Needless Words.  Steve Krug 2000

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.  William Strunk

Get rid of half the words on each page, and then get rid of half of what's left  Steve Krug

In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.  Antoine de Saint Exupéry

So there.

Back in the 1980's Jan Carlzon was trying to breathe new life into an ailing Scandinavian Air Services.  He was famous for saying "You cannot improve one thing by 1000% but you can improve 1000 little things by 1%".  Wind the clock forward 20 years and "Team GB" scooped a helmet-ful of gold medals in Beijing by following a similar principle.  According to David Brailsford, the British Cycling Performance Director, their success has come by way of the “aggregation of marginal gains”. 

So perhaps digital marketers should adopt the job title of "Performance Director" and we should set out to find, and improve, hundreds of different things to have a gold-medal-winning impact on our business.  The really good news is that, unlike elite cyclists we have loads of big and quick wins within our grasp.  So, rather than committing to a gruelling training regime, why not set out on a journey of digital optimisation?

Let's look at the micro and the macros to see where marginal gains make a big difference.  First up, driving traffic.  My thanks Mike Rogers of Optimize for this case study but it just shows how powerful a series of marginal gains can be in overall performance.  The beauty of Google Adwords is that everybody has just 95 characters to get their message across so those that use their characters wisely will enjoy the rewards.  Let's see how changing a few words drove click-through rates up...

The Aggregation of Marginal Search Gains delivers 15% more traffic

The real beauty of this case study is that Yell.com gets more traffic for less cost...the Google Quality Score in PPC, where you pay less for more successful ads, means that you end up with a lower cost per click and your ad gets shown more often meaning even more traffic.  Gold Medal Mike Rogers!

Having managed to drive more people to the site for less, lets look at the macro end of marginal gains.  Email marketing is still a land of sub-optimised marketing and with a little effort pulling the right levers you can make a massive impact on campaign performance.  Below is a scenario for an email marketing campaign.  Let's pretend we're a BtoB organisation and we want to generate 40 registrations for a seminar.  Our campaign metrics may look like this...

Not bad, but not good.  However, let's get the Performance Director in and work on each element: 

• Hard bounce rate...use email repair software to re-build basic errors (missing "@" sign, invalid Top Level Domains etc).  Moving forward, use validation scripts in your web registration form (see Flybe for "best in breed").
• Soft bounce rate, use Spam checking software, make sure you are working with your broadcast partner to identify possible Spam blocks at ISP or Corporate firewall level.  We will never get 100% deliverability, but we should be aiming for 90%.
• Open Rate.  Test "From Fields" with different names, use industry or region personalisation in the subject line and work on the appearance of the preview pane by getting exciting text in the first 6 lines not a great big fat banner that will be disabled in virtually all email clients.
• Click-through rate.  Through segmentation and cunning use of personalisation give the illusion that this email has been crated just for the recipient.  Similarly, work on your "persuasion architecture" and sell the benefits, provide clear cals to action and introduce pace, excitement, fear, uncertainty and doubt!
• Conversion rate.  Pre-populate the landing page or, better still, register them in one click by taking them to a confirmation page.  Certainly don't take them to an empty form with acres of fields to fill in.  Repeat the reasons to register and keep the pace to make sure people don't get cold feet at the final stage. 

So, we've sent out the same number of messages but we have generated 41 registrations, rather than 7.  All the improvements are well within "average" conversation rates that marketers enjoy (more on the danger of "averages" in the next post),  As a prissy direct marketer there is one critical issue to consider here. 

Many years ago web portals crammed millions of buttons and banners onto their home pages and finding what you wanted was a little like a "Where's Wally" puzzle.  Happily some sites like Ryanair still seem to think we have 20 minutes free to find the link we're after...they may as well hide Wally in there to make it fun.

But Google changed all that with their minimalist home page.  Seth Godin in Purple Cow recounts how, in the early days, somebody kept emailing the Google web manager with the homepage word count every time Larry and Sergey added another button...some people care about your site.  Google created the perfect homepage based on the key "successful outcome" of getting people to search: 

• The search bar dominates by its location and size..check out Amazon's new "big" search bar to mimic this
  
• There is little other content to distract us, so we can find wally quickily and easily
  
• The cursor is winking accommodatingly in the search box when the page loads, making it ergonomically easier 

Anyway, just when we thought it would be good to remove the clutter from our home page we now have to do Web 2.0 design things or we're going to fall behind.  So now everybody is building sites with some of these key components:

• Icons or cartoon characters 
  
• Rounded edges for all images and boxes
  
• Shadows and/or reflections where at all possible
  
• Short sentences, simple words 
  
• Mid-Atlantic cool tone of voice - talk about "stuff" (Amazon had a "where's my stuff" button in 1998 so that's not new) 

So now, wherever you go in crowded, competitive markets every site is looking like every other. A quick whizz around the car insurance market and the layout, look and feel are all similar...they may even all be sharing the same "get a quote" button.

So navigation is being liberated from tabs and these little icons are taking over key pages.  Although the UK insurance market has shifted towards this homogenised navigation technique there are still some very very nice executions out there that we can strive towards...here's one of the nicest I've seen from Starbucks...

  

The digital winds of change have blown most cruelly through the offices of travel agents in the past decade.  The sad truth is that we do not need to wander down into a busy high street and watch somebody dressed up as an air steward using a computer to type in our preferred holiday details...we can do that at home (the searching, not the dressing up as air stewards). So the travel industry has become a barometer for what conditions will hit other business sectors, and here's an interesting development...

In TravelMole today it was announced that the two biggest brochure publishers "are being forced to merge because of the dramatic fall in the number of brochure packs and high street travel agents".  In the face of adversity Paul Markland, MD of the publisher BP said “Let’s be upbeat – travel agents and brochures are a valuable part of the holiday sales chain and will be for a long time to come.”  Well, yes and no...

In some decisions you may need old media to help you, and holidays is probably one of those.  So lets say that we are excited about a camping holiday but need to sit down with the family and agree where to go.  Sounds like a job for the Eurocamp web site to me.

Off we go to the web-site, big button in primary navigation is what I'm after and it takes me to a registration page.  

In a couple of clicks we can choose what bits of the brochure to download and after parting with an email address we have a personalised PDF brochure.  Not only that, Eurocamp have my contact details and can link that to the preferences I selected from the brochure page.  We win - we have a brochure to help us choose where to go.  They win - qualified lead that can be chased by email.

So the man from BP was right, and brochures are going to be part of the holiday sales chain for many years to come.  But it won't involve going into a travel agent, or getting a thick paper brochure, or bringing home hundreds of pages you'll never ever to look at...which is why his demand for brochures has dropped from 12 million to 7 million in 5 years along with a 25% decline in Travel Agents