Fixing leaky websites: the five essentials to a behaviourally effective site

by Bri Williams ON 3 April 2013

In my recent post ‘Most websites are leaking money,’ I covered two of the key reasons most websites are failing to convert visitors: they don’t establish confidence and they don’t communicate value. As a result, websites are leaking money. A strange thing is happening though – marketers are getting used to conversion rates of less than 5% and we’re comforting ourselves that that is just how it is.

Well, imagine you owned a corner shop and only five out of every 100 people bought something – you’d not only be desperate for answers, you’d be out of a job. So it’s time to shake off our complacency when it comes to our websites and do something to fix the leaks.

Here are the final three essentials for increasing your website sales and sign-ups using techniques from behavioural science:

Creating a pathway

For your visitor there must be a sensible, stepped progression from one task to the next and from one page to the next. Unfortunately most websites leak because they do too much too early. Remember that websites are like dating – you’ll get much further if you listen rather than talk about yourself incessantly.

When your customer first lands on your site it should be all about them – their problem, their payoff, their confidence. Hold off on bombarding your visitor with multiple requests to do something – sign up, call now, buy this, contact us, read our history, connect with us because you risk sounding like a dozen drill sergeants screaming at a new recruit.

Two key behavioural principles will improve your website’s ability to lead a visitor through to purchase.

Completion: Once started we are more likely to follow through which is why shopping cart abandonment of over 30% is so terrifying – it’s against our nature. Design for small yeses and build toward the sale, and
paradox of choice: We desire choice but get easily overwhelmed by it, which means you can actually increase your likelihood of a sale (or sign up) by limiting the choices you require of your visitor.

Who’s doing it well? Mailchimp does a great job in helping its users not only navigate how to construct an email campaign but moving them to a paid upgrade and Anymeeting feeds people through sign up and use of their web conferencing tools before encouraging upgrade to a paid service.

Asking for action

When the time is right you need to ask your visitor to do something. Most websites leak in three ways. The calls to action (CTA) are either absent, unclear or you have too many.

When asking for action there are three key behavioural principles to use:

Loss aversion: Your visitor will carry anxiety about clicking any call to action. Your job is to overcome that by letting them know what happens when they do,
short-term bias: Instant gratification is very powerful so ‘instant access’ or ‘download now’ will be appealing, and
default bias: Visitors tend to take the path of least resistance so try defaulting selections to those options that are most mutually beneficial.

Who is doing it well? To see a great pathway and CTA visit the website of author Michael Port. You’ll be left in no doubt about what the desired action is. Local innovation gurus at Inventium do a really good job with clear CTAs that help the visitor know exactly what happens when they click.

The effort:reward equation

The final of five essentials to a behaviourally effective website underpins all the others: the effort:reward equation.

The effort:reward equation is my way of boiling behaviour down to two elements:

Effort: What you are asking your visitor to expend: time, money, thinking, energy? and
reward: What does your visitor gets in return: financial benefit, emotional payoff, convenience, status?

When effort is greater or equal to reward, your visitor will not proceed.

When reward exceeds effort, they will take action.

But don’t fall into the trap that most marketers do and concentrate on maximising the perceived reward. You are actually better off reducing effort because that not only increases your visitor’s ability to take action, but makes the reward look even more valuable. Eliminate dead-end pages, pages with too many CTAs, too many conflicting CTAs and repetitious data entry.

Key behavioural principles to apply in managing effort and reward:

Depletion effect: The more decisions we make in a day the more fatigued we become and we tend to defer to default options. On your site, the more decisions you require of your visitor the more important it will be to have easy and defaulted options because otherwise you risk them shutting off, and
Paradox of choice: Eliminate extraneous CTAs and decisions because confused visitors will flee rather than persevere.

Who is doing it well? Google is the poster child when it comes to reducing effort. What can be simpler than one search box? The reward is pretty strong too, instantly gratifying the visitor with a screen full of search results. WordPress make setting up and managing a blog simple, including allowing the visitor to switch designs for their blog live and without fear of losing content.

Five essentials to get it done

That wraps up the five essentials to a behaviourally effective website. By following the process of establishing confidence, communicating value, creating a pathway, asking for action and managing the effort:reward equation you will maximise your potential to turn visitors into customers. Your website can and should be generating more business for you, and now you have the framework for getting it done.

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Most websites are leaking money

by Bri Williams ON 1 March 2013

Most of the websites I visit are leaking money and yours might be one of them. Out of every 100 people who visit an average website, only five are becoming customers*. Worse still, three out of every 10 online shopping carts are being abandoned*. Something is broken, and it’s up to marketers to fix it.

The fundamentals have been screwed up

The task of your website is to get someone to do something. Ultimately it’s about that visitor buying something which means your task as a marketer is to create a process of behavioural change. ‘Process’ is important here because the secret lies in small, behavioural steps rather than expecting your visitor to take giant leaps.

I’ve boiled the secrets of increasing your website sales and sign-ups down to five essentials. Here are the first two. (I’ll cover the rest next time.)

Establishing confidence

When someone lands on your website you have to establish two types of confidence in order for them to proceed: confidence in them that they’ve landed where they intended, and confidence in you that you’re a site that can be trusted.

And the scary news is that you have around seven seconds to do this.

There are three principles of behavioural economics you can leverage here.

Social proof: gaining confidence from the fact that others have done business with you,
loss aversion: overcoming any anxiety through guarantees and credentials, and
fast thinking: designing content that can be processed easily rather than copy-heavy text and confusing images.

To establish the visitor’s self-confidence look at clearly naming your business in the header and matching the language on the site with search terms that they may have used.

To establish confidence in you consider how you display your credentials (years established, industry accreditations) and proof points (guarantees of service and testimonials).

Who’s doing it well? Check out Mailchimp.com, The Book Depository, Anymeeting.com and Birdsnest.com.au to see how they establish confidence.

Communicating value

“Can you solve my problem?”

The question that your visitor has in their mind is pretty obvious, isn’t it? And yet most websites fail to articulate the problem they solve and the value they offer. Instead they bang on about their history and bombard the visitor with product ranges and special offers. It’s simple too much, too soon.

Remember that your website should be like a date not a lecture.

We’ve all had bad dates where the person talked about themselves at length without pausing for breath. What happened? You got bored and left as quickly as possible.

That’s what a lot of websites do – “At XYZ company we…”, “I’m passionate about…”, “Our business prides itself on…” – Who cares! At this point your visitor simply wants to know ‘Can you solve my problem?’

As marketing professionals value propositions are our bread and butter. Look at your website now and check whether your value proposition does the following:

Articulates the problem your visitor has,
explains how you solve this problem,
describes the payoff, and
explains why only you can do this.

If it doesn’t, then you are missing one of the most essential elements of getting your visitors to buy from you.

In addition to answering the four points above, to communicate value there are three principles of behavioural economics you should aim to use in your value proposition:

Loss aversion: We hate to lose more than we love to gain so communicate what the visitor has to lose if they don’t address the problem,
Scarcity: When it’s rare it’s valuable. When Facebook and Pinterest started they used exclusivity to build desire, so what is rare about your solution? What is your key differentiator? and
Social proof: We follow what others have done so use statistics on your customer base and/or testimonials to showcase your value.

Who’s doing it well? It’s tough to find great examples of value propositions – it’s like the forgotten magical ingredient for effective websites. Evernote.com is one of my favourites and you can check out my website briwilliams.com.au to see how I’ve approached it.

The first two essentials for effective websites, establishing confidence and communicating value are make or break. If you have as little as seven seconds to get your visitor to engage, the heavy lifting has to be done above the fold.

In my next post we’ll cover three more essentials: creating a pathway, asking for action and the effort-reward equation, which together will mean your website stops leaking money and you will see your conversions skyrocket. In the meantime I’d love hear your thoughts on who you think is doing it best.

* ‘Online Retailing Australia 2011′ by Forrester Research

Where to next for the marketing profession? 3 observations

by Bri Williams ON 19 October 2012

First, a confession: mine was not a marketing degree and I have never been responsible for a marketing campaign. Instead, in my time as a product manager I worked alongside marketers within a marketing function and, more recently, as a behavioural specialist I have worked with marketers to increase conversion through behavioural economics. I guess you could call me a ‘little m’ marketer.

You can say then, that I have been watching the marketing profession from the house next door. Seeing who comes and goes, who renovates and who lets their house run down.

My observations I share in the hope they stimulate rage. Rage against how the profession is perceived and rage against being short changed in how you can better do your job.

Observation 1: Marketers are data drunk

The life of a marketer has radically changed in the last decade, from relying on research, cumbersome segmentation models and buying lists to shaping interactions with consumers to extract their data directly.

From any theorists point of view, businesses now have the resources, smarts and justification to reconcile all this data into a meaningful, insightful source of certainty. I mean, you’d be crazy not to. And that’s why so much money is being thrown at ‘single-customer view’ and integrated management systems.

But to my eye, no one seems short of data, everyone seems short of answers. The data that is available is not providing a clear path on what marketers should do to get their buyers to take action. While it may give a picture of what people have done, it always falls short of answering ‘what will they do?’ and that’s what marketers need to know most.

Observation 2: Marketers guess

Despite all the data floating around and the theoretical frameworks of how marketing can be effective, at the end of the day, at the coalface where the marketing campaign meets its market, marketers have to guess. Why? Because marketers are in the business of influencing people, and humans don’t come with a ‘how to’ manual.

Until now, marketers have had to rely on guesswork. Educated guesswork, but guesswork nonetheless. After all, if we weren’t guessing, we’d be able to go to market every time knowing exactly what would happen. If only!

And the need to guess I think has impacted the credibility of the profession. Along with HR practitioners, marketers have been tagged as dealing in ‘soft skills’ and as a result, struggled to gain boardroom gravitas.

The perversity of this is that ‘soft skills’ are the hardest of all. Try being an accountant without access to a whole battery of codified standards that defines the outcome of your input.

Well, I think it’s time for marketers to find a way to eliminate guesswork and in so doing, stamp their authority on the science of ‘soft skills’. And the good news is the way to do this already exists.

Observation 3: Marketers spin plates

Marketers have become slaves to meeting culture, and through this, become order takers rather than order makers. Running from meeting to meeting, juggling budgets and stakeholder expectations, the life of a marketer has become reactive and problem solving rather than proactive and value generating. A lot of plates have to be spun, leaving no time or intellectual capacity to pave the way forward. Let’s not kid ourselves – marketing is fast becoming an administrative rather than creative endeavour. How depressing. Surely that’s not why we work in marketing?

Then why do I see most of the thinking outsourced to creative agencies? Why do I see marketers in the corporate sector brief a campaign and then rely on the agency to do the mental grunt work? And why do marketers not demand from their agencies an explanation of why their solution will impact the behaviour of the market? If you are relying on someone to do your thinking, at least have them explain it.

To my mind marketers are leaving themselves open to poor results because they themselves are not owners of the knowledge about what makes people behave the way they do. Rather than being experts in human behaviour, marketers seem to be deferring to others and cloaking themselves in busyness.

Well, maybe we’ve been spinning plates because an alternative has not been evident? Until now.

The new age of marketing

So what do I see when I look from the house next door? I see a new age of marketing emerging. Guesswork will be replaced by answers, opinion by science. Marketers will be the leaders in behavioural knowledge because they will have to be to generate value. They will lead their businesses in shaping results because no one knows better than they that everything in business – absolutely everything – has a behavioural basis.

The new age is here and it is available to you in the form of behavioural economics, your ‘how-to’ guide for human behaviour. It presents you with science-based answers on why people behave and expectations of how they will. If your agencies are using it, ask them how. If they’re not, ask them why. If my observations from next door have enraged, then simply let me say this: don’t get even, get answers.

The behavioural economics of plain packaging

by Bri Williams ON 15 August 2012

The Australian Federal Government has successfully withstood a High Court challenge on the constitutional legitimacy of plain packaging legislation. So with help from the field of behavioural economics, let’s now look at the behavioural legitimacy of the decision to ban all branding from tobacco packaging.

Behavioural economics

Behavioural economics is a field of study that starts with the proposition that we are all prone to make decisions that are not always in our own best interest. We sign up to gyms we don’t attend, we buy things we don’t need because they’re on sale, we volunteer our time to causes, we drive further to get four cents off a litre of petrol… we do things that an economist would say are just not rational. And smoking, something that uncontrovertibly poses a significant health risk (not to mention is very expensive), is well and truly in the irrational bucket.

Three things to be behaviourally effective

For something to be behaviourally effective – in this case getting the target to not take up smoking – there are generally three things you need to do:

Make it hard: create obstacles and/or overwhelm the decision making process,
make it socially unacceptable: create fear of being socially shunned, and
negatively impact self identity: create dissonance between sense of self and behaviour.

1. Will plain packaging make it hard to take up smoking?

Behavioural economics affirms that we are programmed to find the path of least resistance. For example, having your phone with you all the time invariably means you will check your email and social networks more often. Creating a barrier to access by leaving your phone in the other room however will reduce the likelihood of incessant checking.

And so it is with smoking. There are two parts to making it hard to take up smoking.

a. Overwhelm with undifferentiated choice

Known as the ‘choice paradox’, as consumers we seek to have an array of choice only to be overwhelmed by it when it comes to the crunch. Insurance, banking and superannuation are salient examples.

Plain packaging will play a role in confusing consumer choice. Where once a smoker could easily identify their preferred brand by the packet’s colour and logo, removal of such mnemonic devices will inhibit the ease of recall and selection. This is particularly so with an inexperienced smoker who may still be in the impulse rather than addictive phase.

b. Impede ease of physical access

Making access to cigarettes more difficult is key to reducing use. Age restrictions, requiring ID, and now having the product locked away in cupboards behind counters are great strategies to interfere with ease of access.

In this regard, plain packaging in unlikely to have any incremental impact. Since the introduction of mandated cupboards, branding has been hidden from view and so the smoker has had to ask the shop assistant to find the product. While it may slow down the attendant, plain package or branded, the sale will proceed.

2. Will plain packaging make smoking socially unacceptable?

We are enormously influenced by what others do. Known as ‘herding’, ‘social norming’ or ‘band wagoning’, we tend to stay with the pack most of the time. While we each like to think we are above average (and studies have shown that more people rate themselves an above-average driver than 50% of the population!) most of our behaviour is about adopting what is the societal norm. Hence so many have joined Facebook and LinkedIn – check out the daily commuter cycle if you don’t believe me.

Smoking has undeniably been moved into the ‘less acceptable’ than ‘acceptable’ category, and the TV show Mad Men with its constant puffing attests to how far we’ve come in a couple of generations.

Will plain packaging increase the level of social unacceptability? No. For this to happen, we instead need to rely on continued efforts. First, the separation of areas in which people can smoke so that it is undesirable to leave the gang to go and have a cigarette. And second, society has to continue to stigmatise smoking – that means not giving it credibility in films, for example.

3. Will plain packaging negatively impact self-identity?

Each of us has a sense of who we are and spends most of our time subconsciously assessing the world for how it fits with our self belief. When something doesn’t reconcile between how we see ourselves and our behaviour, we experience a psychological tension called ‘cognitive dissonance’. Because this state is uncomfortable, we do a few things to rebalance.

Ignore the new information

When confronted with information that we don’t like, we tend to ignore it. If you find yourselves switching off from Transport Accident Commission ads or avoiding doctor’s appointments, you’ll know what I mean. This is the trap the current grotesque ads on cigarette packets fall into – smokers simply ignore the ad.

Distort the new information to fit our self view

Ever sat in a meeting and had two people form completely opposing views on the basis of the same information? Chances are they have simply filtered it through their own internal narrative to make sense of how it fits with their existing ideas.

Modify our behaviour to fit

Least likely but possible, we can modify our behaviour if it is out of whack with how we are or want to be. Hello diets, hello gym.

The government will be hoping that plain packaging will encourage smokers (or pre-smokers) to modify their behaviour because there is no longer a brand to use as an expression of self-identity. However, I think this horse bolted when tobacco advertising was strangled years ago, and now the bigger identity at play is as a ‘smoker’, not as an ‘XYZ brand smoker’. In that respect, plain packaging will not adversely impact self identity because it’s the act of smoking that is the identity, not the brand.

Further, a probable scenario is that those who smoke will see plain packaging as a brutal attempt to thwart their freedom to choose rather than an act of good intent. This will likely incite anger and result in a recommitment to identifying as a rebel/individual/outsider.

So will plain packaging work?

Will it work? As a behaviourally strategy on its own, plain packaging has some shortcomings. Tobacco is an addictive product so the fact that a smoker’s preferred brand is now in an unbranded packet will not be enough to have them quit. But for people at the point of considering smoking, it may at least create brand confusion and limit any residual halo effect the brands may have. The great thing is that plain packaging is not a strategy on its own, and when viewed in the context of tobacco pricing, Quit campaigns, limits on product availability and restrictions on use, we can at least be sure that every opportunity to eradicate smoking is being considered.