Archive for the ‘Writing for the web’ Category
Posted on August 23, 2006 by Robbin Steif
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
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Writing for the web
Posted on August 16, 2006 by Robbin Steif
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
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Posted on July 19, 2006 by Robbin Steif
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
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Writing for the web
Posted on June 26, 2006 by Robbin Steif
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
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Posted on June 15, 2006 by Robbin Steif
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
View Comments (7 Responses) | Categories: Conversion Science, Writing for the web
Posted on March 5, 2006 by Robbin Steif
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
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Posted on March 3, 2006 by Robbin Steif
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
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Posted on March 1, 2006 by Robbin Steif
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
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Posted on February 25, 2006 by Robbin Steif
People don’t care about me — but I don’t take it personally. Everyone is too busy caring about themselves to care about me.
That’s why I try hard on my company’s website to speak in the second person (“you” not “me”), and to write about benefits. All my website visitors have only one question: “What’s in it for me?”
Look at this company feature: “We create key performance indicators for your web analytics.”
Now for the corresponding benefit: “Once you have key performance indicators, you won’t have to wade through hundreds of reports – you’ll see your site’s performance at a glance.
OK, let’s try another example, feature first: “This barbecue light is battery operated.”
And now for the corresponding benefit: “This barbecue battery-operated light enables you to see when outlets aren’t available — like in your back yard.”
The first one is more about the seller: This is what we’ll do for you, or this is what our product does. The second one is about the buyer, “We’ll work our magic and here’s what’s in it for you.
Selling with benefits isn’t limited to the web. We should sell with benefits in
brochures, in sales calls, in advertisements. But I’ll leave that to the brochure blogs and the sales blogs and the advertisement blogs…
Robbin
LunaMetrics
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Posted on February 21, 2006 by Robbin Steif
I’ve been having an email conversation over the last couple days with John Zeratsky from Feedburner. (If you have a feed to your blog or website and aren’t already using them to measure your feed, it’s worth a look. Your feed readers are your most loyal feeders – they are your subscribers.)
The conversation with John started when I used some wizard or searched their knowledgebase looking for answers and the answer ended, “Was this helpful to you? Yes or No?” So I clicked No and wrote, “I figured out what do it but I don’t understand it. I feel like FeedBurner is written by techies for techies.”
John replied that non-techies do some of the writing, but in general I was right– technical people are their current primary audience, and they struggle over how to address the non-technical audience. Addressing the non-techie audience is going to become pretty important to FeedBurner over time if feeds become more prevalent (and if they don’t, FeedBurner may never reach their financial goals, whatever those goals might be.)
So here’s the example I gave John. This sentence really burned me (pun fully intended):
If you HTTP-redirect your
feed to FeedBurner, you may enter your original source feed URL here.
FeedBurner will use this URL in all feed links offered to potential
subscribers.
There are two problems with if. First, it is written in geek-speak. But second, I perceived that it was some kind of opportunity, like this: “If you want to HTTP-redirect….” After all, everywhere else I look on that site, they are offering opportunities to make one’s feed better.
In fact, here is what it means (and John gets all the credit for rewriting it, although I was disappointed to see that the new wording is not on their site):
If you have configured your web server to redirect users from your old feed to your new one, you’ll want to instruct subscribers to use your old address (so that the redirect can work its magic). Enter that original address here and we’ll instruct potential subscribers to use that address instead of the new one.
And I got it. In fact, when I finally understood it, I was tempted to write back, “Oh you mean, like a 301! Well, why didn’t you say so?” but then I would have been as guilty of geek-speak as FeedBurner.
A site like FeedBurner (and your site may be similar – with one audience at the beginning but a growing, different audience moving in over time) needs to address multiple personas. One way they could do this, I pointed out to John, is to use a definition in a box. So if I’m a non-geek, those fun-but-geeky phrases like “Burn your Feed” could be underlined with a dashed line and when the user clicked or even moused over them, the definition comes up. Alternatively, they could do exactly what John did in his rewritten text: keep the same tone as the rest of the site but make it for the masses.
My final thought is about having someone else read your site before you go public (or even after you do.) This particular small example wasn’t about just tech-talk but was also about phraseology — I looked at is as an opportunity (“If only you would”) and they meant it conditionally (“If you have already”) So, always get someone far outside of your space to read your site.
Robbin
View Comments (1 Response) | Categories: Writing for the web
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