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

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. As Xavier Casanova points out, 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
LunaMetrics

Right after I graduated from college, I worked at a magazine. One day, the executive editor came down to my office and pointed out a particularly ugly ad in the magazine. It was a direct response ad (”Call this 1-800 number for your….” etc.)

“We run this ad every month,” he said, “It’s awful. Please call the company and tell them that we’ll redesign it at no charge.”

So I called.

“Thank you for your offer,” the company representative said. “We know it’s ugly. We don’t like it either. But this ad outpulls every other test ad we’ve ever run.” Wow, was I impressed.

Contrast this to a conversation I had just last week. A customer asked me to create her Google AdWords campaign, but wanted to review the ads before they ran. “I don’t like them,” she said, “The way those ads are written — they just don’t sound like me.”

Well, she’s the customer, so I didn’t reply (something that email has made easy to do), but I sure did wonder if she wasn’t interested in making money or not. As long as the ad is ethical and clear, who cares if the tone is not that of the CEO?

Companies have multiple goals when they write for the web, as I pointed out in my last post on writing for the web. I’m also not saying that you should always choose the copy that outpulls — after all, maybe the test that loses the copy competition pulls a customer who has a longer lifetime value. Or maybe it does a better job of positioning your company in your niche. But if you’re going to choose less than optimal copy, be sure you know why you’re making that choice.

Robbin Steif, CEO
LunaMetrics

I have a customer with an e-commerce site who insists on calling one of her products ProductA while the rest of the world calls them ProductB. She claims that the experts use the phrase ProductA, and she doesn’t care that her customers aren’t the experts and are still using the everyday ProductB handle. “I can teach them,” she claims, and to that end, she has started calling them “ProductA (ProductB).”

Only one company in the world, that I can think of, has successfully taught customers to use their nomenclature — Starbucks. People walk into Starbucks and ask for a Mocha Latte Vente. Not me — I still ask for a Large, because I’m too busy to remember which one is small, medium or large. But, I digress.

Furthermore, in her efforts to teach her visitors, she has induced a level of uncertainty. Does her nomenclature mean that now I get a B with my A?

This problem is actually harder than it sounds. I have another customer who is a design firm. They have created all sorts of cool terminology and have embedded that terminology in their company culture. They feel that if they don’t use the terminology on their website, they will have ripped out the heart of their company. The first customer, the one with ProductA and ProductB, has a similar problem — she started her career as an educator, and not to educate is anathema to her. In a nutshell, both customers are saying, their sites are about more than just money and visitors and customers. It is an extension of who they are and what they stand for.

But if you really do care more about money and about turning browsers into buyers, this is a great place to use your on-site search and web analytics, an issue I blogged about earlier in the week. If you really believe that you are best served using your own phrases and terminology — look at your analytics and see if most of your visitors are actually using your phraseology or their own. And send me email (or just reply to this post) if you find out that I am wrong (after all, Starbucks succeeded — maybe you are the next Starbucks!)

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Just last week, I blogged about writing for the web. If we write as if the visitor is standing in front of us, we can have a more personal exchange (and convert more visitors into customers.)

Then a couple of days ago, I signed up to go to a usability conference. Today, the usability guys sent me back a form letter:

Robbin,

I think it’s great that you’ve decided to join us for the UIE
Roadshow. It’s shaping up to be a fun and exciting day, one that
you’ll find yourself talking about for months to come.

We’ve already had a bunch of people sign up. I’m expecting that
we’ll be near the room’s capacity in each city. It’s good that
you registered early.

Sound like a form letter to you? Right, it doesn’t sound anything like a form letter. They wrote it as if it were a personal letter, from them to me. How fabulous!

Wouldn’t it be great if we could write on our sites like we write to our friends? We sound so genuine that way — potential customers must just believe us.

Robbin
LunaMetrics

Yesterday, I started working with a new customer. On her home page, she had text that read: New clothing by Company-A New Release! IRRESISTABLE!!! WOMENS MENS PANTS SHORTS sweaters turtlenecks mocks. CARDIGANS coming soon! (Words changed slightly to create a different product category.)

I called her and this was the analogy I gave her: Imagine if you walked into a department store and the salesperson said, “May I help you?” You answer, “No thanks, just looking.” Instead of accepting that, the salesperson says, “NO, NO, you MUST look at these AMAZING new products!!! You are going to LOVE them!! Now come with me!!”

The customer got it immediately. “I would run from that salesperson as soon as possible.” This morning, when I got on her site, I saw that she had already edited them to sound like a salesperson you would want to talk to.

I always come back to the same caution — whether we are writing error messages or product benefits, we should write in the same tone that we would use when speaking to a customer in person.

Robbin
LunaMetrics