“You really mix it up, Robbin, don’t you?” LunaMetrician Jason Green joked as he unpacked box after box of Melitta’s Breakfast Blend javapods.

“Well, that’s what you guys drink,” I answered. But in fact, that wasn’t the main reason that I bought all Breakfast Blend. Melitta just didn’t have the information that I needed to distinguish between their products. And I saw the same problem with the user tests we did in December, for a completely different kind of customer.

The problem was that the Melitta site made it too hard for me to buy anything else. I would have loved to try some new stuff, but all those coffee words didn’t mean anything to me.

For example, one of the flavors was, “A Cafe Kind of Day.” The description is, “The forecast calls for smooth and satisfying. The 100% Colombian brew delivers a subtle, wine-like overtone from daybreak to nightfall. Each box contains 18 pods. Fits all Coffee Pod Brewers.”

Seems simple? Not to me. I want to hear, “This is the perfect cup of coffee when you have that mid-afternoon sleepy feeling.” Or, “Just awesome when you crave something as dark as espresso, but can’t get to your machine.” I need some way to differentiate this kind of coffee from “Breakfast Blend.” With Breakfast Blend, I understand one important feature: it is for drinking in the morning. All those other blends — I just couldn’t tell the difference.

This is the same issue I saw last week in user testing. We had a site with product after product, and they were so similar. The owner certainly understood how and when to make a selection, because he knows the product selection intimately. Some of the users, however, were overwhelmed. He needed to tell them when to choose each one — just like Melitta needed to tell me how to choose a flavor of coffee.

Next time, I am going to find a site that has compatible coffee pods, and that tells me what to buy, and why. And we’ll try something new.

Robbin

You know how you get to the end of a checkout form, and there is the opportunity to sign up for someone’s email marketing list? Unless you don’t notice it, or you really want to be on the list, you generally don’t check it; after all, who needs more email? So stick with me and see what I saw today.

Here I am, working on DataBazaar’s website (they sell printer ink). And as part of that process, I am pretending to buy a product.

So I get to the end of the checkout process, and instead of saying, “Please add me to your mailing list,” it says, “Please send me money saving coupons.” Talk about great writing for the web. Lots of people have email marketing lists that include coupons, but they tend to be worded in your average boring way: “Please notify me of upcoming coupons via your weekly email newsletter.” (I actually got that one off a competitor’s website.)

Do other people have great ways of asking customers to sign up for their email marketing (that work?) I’d love to hear.

Robbin

You can read Part I of this topic here.

Soon after writing about great thank you pages, I had a chance to look at one. We signed another new customer and I started poking around their site to learn more. I filled out a “contact us” form and was awed at the incredible reply. “Thank you for your request for information,” it read. “Your form is being routed to the person who can help you, which will be Jane Smith. She will get back to you in about 24 hours, but if you want to call her yourself, she is at 800-123-4567.” Then they included an opportunity to opt into their email newsletter (so that I would have a second chance to convert that day.) And finally, Jane Smith got back to me by email within an hour or so.

So they gave me a name, a timeline, a phone number and a chance to convert again, all in a sentence or two. And they lived up to their promise.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Thank you pages serve a number of goals:

• They let the customer know that he successfully completed the transaction
• They may give the customer critical information (”Thank you for subscribing. Check your email to get your subscription link.”)
• They may be printed by the customer as a receipt
• They are an easy way to tell your web analytics that a conversion took place.

Besides serving all these goals, thank you pages provide a special opportunity that many sites, especially e-commerce sites, do not take advantage of. Most of us know by now that it is very important not to stop the customer when she is trying to spend money, and that’s why we don’t have mandatory registrations or surveys before the shopping cart. The thank you page is the perfect place for those things:

1) Surveys. Some e-commerce sites already have professional surveys, like BizRate. (Read what I wrote about invasive surveys.) Most do not have any surveys (because if they did, I’d be taking surveys every other day.) I pleaded with an e-commerce customer to put a survey on his website, and while we agonized about the wording and she dragged her feet for months, she ultimately did put the survey up. She has been awed at the kind of actionable information customer have been giving her on her survey (especially because she included a large freeform box for customers to make any comments that they like.)

2) Registration. Like a good etailer, you let them purchase as a guest. Why not ask for the registration now, on the thank you page? You’ve already got all the information you need except a password and username (and you might even make the email address into a username if that’s how your site works.)

3) Other opportunities. The thank you page is the perfect place to ask customers if they would like to be a member of a virtual focus group. Virtual focus groups give you a small mailing list that you can ask questions of — about the site, about your service, about new products. Most people don’t compensate the group but may do an annul coupon or other thank you gift. An even better way to recruit members for this group is to ask everyone who emails a complaint or a compliment to join — those people are already engaged with your company at a high emotional level.

4) And my favorite: The thank you page that gives you a chance to go back to the site and buy some more.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Last week, I read David Meerman Scott’s excellent and free e-book, The New Rules of PR. I was already pretty schooled in the SEO and PR thing (after all, I am a publisher). But David made a point that I really hadn’t thought about before. I always focused on the Dan Rather and Swift Boats episodes, i.e. a press release to a blogger can end up all over the Internet and eventually on CNN. David made a related but not identical point: under the old rules, only journalists saw the press release. Today, publishers on the web, like me, may pick up the press release in its entirety, and that means that regular people - not just journalists - are reading press releases.

Now that non-journalists are reading our releases — why are we writing them in the same old boring fashion? Why aren’t we writing for an audience that doesn’t want to read marketing spin? In fact, why do we even organize them the old fashioned way?

I think I was fated to have read his e-book when I did, because I started the next day with a phone call from Traci Hailpern, VP of Marketing at Feedburner. “We’re buying Blogbeat.net,” she explained, and asked if I would contribute a quote to their press release.

Both Traci and I were really tied up that day, so their PR agency wrote a quote for me, which they read over the phone while I was supposed to be eating lunch. Here’s what the PR agency wrote for me:

“This acquisition is a logical extension of FeedBurner’s valuable service,” said Robbin F. Steif, CEO of LunaMetrics, LLC. “I’ve been thrilled with each of these services separately and have wanted a more efficient way to determine how my feed subscriber trends relate to my blog traffic. I continue to be impressed with FeedBurner’s ability to keep its customers’ best interests in mind as the company grows.”

It’s really not bad. I give the PR firm credit for understanding Feedburner’s business. But if everyone on the web is going to read it, why don’t we talk like real people instead of like marketers?

Here’s what I dictated to them:

“I had been using each of these services separately and am so excited about this acquisition — the very best feed analytics company purchasing the best blog analytics company,” said Robbin F. Steif, CEO of LunaMetrics, LLC, a web analytics and conversion consultancy. “Now I can go to one place for all my blog data. Congratulations, FeedBurner, for making a great choice!”

Now, Feedburner being the incredibly cool company that they are, no one really cared about this particular release. FB created a special page with funny FAQs and a great cartoon and the whole world linked there instead. (Truly great marketing.) But most other companies don’t have that same sense of style and are still relying on their press releases — so why don’t we start writing them to be read?

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

I linked a debit card to my PayPal account and then tried to use it. They let me use it, but
sent me semi-threatening messages (which I can’t get exactly right since I don’t have them in front of me.)

Are you sure you don’t want to use your bank account instead of a debit card?
When you use your bank account, your information is always private. We never
charge you. [And there was a third "benefit" to using my bank account.]

Does that mean that when I fund my payments with my debit card, they give it to the third party? Since I was sending money to a pal, I sincerely doubt they gave him my credit card info. (They might, however, have charged me for the priviledge.) This is the same issue I wrote about two days ago - when you pull out certain benefits for certain products and don’t mention them for other products, you create doubt in the customer’s mind about whether those benefits apply to all your products.

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Dear Joel:

Yesterday, I saw your very interesting question on the Web Analytics forum. How do I get people to subscribe to the RSS feed, you asked, when they don’t understand what RSS is? You pointed out that you have an extensive explanation of RSS on your site and give readers some ideas of what feedreaders are and which ones they might check out (so why aren’t they getting it?)

Here is my advice to you and everyone else who wants subscribers to their feeds. BTW, don’t accept it as gospel — test it. One of the pieces of advice I tested myself and it didn’t work for my blog, but I have a different audience than you do.

• Getting subscribers is hard, so deal with it. Lots of people can’t be bothered, or they are just cruising by and want to read something you wrote about that day — not every day.
• Get your feed information up there prominently, not in a little footnote (or even in the fine print at the top of the page.)
• Give visitors the option of subscribing by email as well as your feed. Feedburner now has that capability (and they may still have a FeedFlare enabling you to do it through a second party, too.) Let me point out that I tried this and no one signed up for my feed through email, but I have a somewhat more technical blog and probably have a readership that understands feeds (and if someone reading my letter to Joel doesn’t understand the feed thing and would like to, please send me email, steif at lunametrics.) Joel, your readership is probably a lot more like the blog for the fertility doctor that I monitor — her subscriber base is about 2.5% the size of her drive-by readership.
• And most important of all, stop calling it RSS and stop teaching people what it means and how it’s about XML. They probably stop dead in their tracks as soon as they get to the X word. You need to write sometime like, “Want to get our online magazine sent to you every day? Here’s how you do it….” and then just explain the “how” and not the “why.” If you start by including an email option everyone will understand what you are trying to achieve because everyone understands the idea of getting it in their inbox.
• Remember that this is a conversion like any other and so all the same rules apply. Test. Don’t hide the call to action. Don’t hide the price (free.) Etc.

Hope this helps you and everyone else who wants subscribers. BTW, the best thing that can happen to you is consumer generated media — someone else says, “This blog is the greatest, you have to subscribe!” The second best thing you can do is provide awesome content so that they will *want* to subscribe. (Or maybe they’re reversed…)

Sincerely,

Robbin Steif
LunaMetrics

Does your site mean the same thing to your readers as it does to you?

Frequent readers know that poor writing for the web drives me a little crazy. The worst are the site owners who insist on using their own language, despite the fact that it is meaningless to the rest of the world. Not quite as bad, but still up there on my list of lousy web writers are the site owners who really do think that everyone else understands (they just don’t.)

So I have a real life story, along these lines. Since I’m an analyst, I’m always looking for new ways to measure my blog and my site. Last week, I signed up for Blogbeat (web analytics for blogs.)

It’s a free 30 day trial and the signup is simple enough. Then I got to this field, “RSS or Atom URL.” Now that I use FeedBurner, I couldn’t tell easily if my feed is RSS or Atom. I hunted around some and then just decided that it was probably RSS. (For the record, my feed when I originally wrote this post was in Atom.) I was surprised when the signup screen came back to me with this error message, “We couldn’t verify your RSS or Atom Feed. Please check it again… etc.” Well gosh, I thought, how could they verify my feed when they never even asked for it… at which point I realized that I had completely misunderstood the “RSS vs. Atom” field. Blogbeat wasn’t asking whether my feed was RSS or Atom, they were just asking me to please type in the name of my feed (be it RSS or Atom.)

This is a great example of how sites lose visitors. The visitor tries to give you their money or sign up, but we make it too hard for them. If we want a credit card card in a special format (no hyphens), then tell the visitor. If the web address needs the http, tell the visitor. Blogbeat needs to tell their visitors what they want, up front. (Also, they will convert more visitors if they tell them where to find one’s feed address - the universe of people who have blogs and other feed-type media is no longer as tech-savvy as it once was.)

Robbin
LunaMetrics

After trying to subscribe to Jim Sterne’s newsletter, Sterne Measures, for a month now, the light bulb went on and I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to do it in Mozilla from the e-Metrics Summit site. So I moved over to IE (I really hate IE, but it is useful at times) and subscribed, no problem at all.

It was a double opt-in — the kind where you sign up and then you get an email asking you to confirm your fervent wish and desire to be on the mailing list. So I did the second opt-in from my email box and was very promptly greeted by this new email message:

OK - now you’re subscribed to Sterne Measures.
Thanks for being willing to work so hard.
Here’s the most recent issue: February 28, 2006

What great writing! It felt like he was standing there talking to me. Every bit as great as the auto-response that Jarad Spool wrote me when I signed up for the UIE course.

Sometimes I have trouble writing in this one-to-one style — especially when I’m doing my email marketing, which I find so much harder than blogging. When that happens, I imagine just one person I know who is on my email list, and pretend like I’m writing the email just to her. Later I go back and take out all the really personal stuff, but it helps create that “just you and me” tone that is so vital to the Internet. Remember — leave the Madison Avenue tone to the advertising agencies and find a genuine voice on the web. You’ll create a more authentic site, have greater credibility — and ultimately, convert more browsers into buyers.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

FeedBurner, hit a double yesterday with their new Uncommon Uses service. They both enhanced their analytic service and set up a great conversion opportunity for themselves.

First, the analytics. Those of you who know FeedBurner already understand that they are the company that handles your feeds - tracks them, measures them, gives you tools to enhance them, etc. Yesterday, they unveiled their Uncommon Uses service, which tracks strange, different or just uncommon uses of your feeds. For example, they showed me that one site is a blog that pulls together many web analytics feeds, and I was featured.

They also unveiled (or at least, showed me for the first time) Aggregate Item Use — i.e. which posts get clicked on the most. (Note: I learned that my recent post on Campaign Codes, which I thought was too techie for the marketing people and too simple for the techies, was my most popular.) But to access Aggregate Item Use, one needs a secret handshake, or at least a subscription to their Pro Service ($4.99/month for 3 feeds or less).

This was nothing short of brilliant in the field of conversion science. Here’s what FeedBurner did right:

• They showed me what I’m missing. I’ve been using the service for three months now, and this is the first time I have even wanted to pay five bucks a month because it’s the first time they’ve showed me what it can do for me. Or to paraphrase a recent post, I saw what was in it for me.
• They didn’t scream at me when I tried to access this member’s only part of the site (Like those awful error messages, “Subscribers only - Keep out.”) Instead, they handled it with humor and made me feel like I wanted to spend the money.

And so, I did. Spend the money, that is.

Robbin ( FeedBurner Pro Member)
LunaMetrics