Finding the Right Message

by Jennifer Havice

  Hesitations

  How often have you started filling out an online form and then stopped? Or, you were ready to click the buy button, then suddenly decided not to?

  You’re not alone. It happens too often. Website users routinely abandon what they’re doing at the most critical moment—namely, taking action exactly when it counts most:

  Signing up for an e-mail list

  Putting in credit card details

  Filling out a contact form

  Why?

  Because the copy needed to reduce whatever friction the user is feeling isn’t there. Friction means anything that’s making it more difficult for your users to get things done on your site. When we’re talking about interactions with your website, friction generally isn’t a good thing.

  These are typical problems that cause friction:

  Slow page loading times

  Links that don’t work

  Poor navigation

  Add to that list any copy that does a poor job of addressing your visitors’ concerns or potential roadblocks to making a purchase.

  What constitutes a hesitation in your customer’s mind? This can be as simple as uncertainty over whether a credit card number is necessary to start a free trial. Imagine reading about a great new online service. The company promises a fourteen-day free trial upon signing up. Except when you get to the bottom of the page to click the button taking you to the sign-up form, there’s no telling if there will be any strings attached. If you’re not keen on giving up your credit card details, you may decide it’s not worth moving on to the next page to find out.

  This is known as the “ambiguity effect,” or the preference to choose an option with a known favorable outcome versus one that is unknown.4 We are more comfortable making decisions when it’s clear what we’re getting ourselves into. On a website, providing visitors with the information they need when they need it can go a long way to relieving any hesitation they may have about taking action.

  Triggers

  Whether you’re driving down a road or navigating a website, you’re looking for signs to tell you where to go and what you can do. Stop signs at intersections and mile markers on highways give us critical information that triggers our behavior. Without them, we’re lost.

  The same holds true for websites. No matter how motivated someone is to purchase your product or service, that person needs direction. She needs to know what to do in order to take action. Think “Buy Now” buttons on a product page or a “Get Free Brochure” button on a lead-generation page. Triggers must convey the right information at the right time. Let’s say you’re marketing an online course for $3,000. Telling your visitors to “buy now” at the top of the page without first filling them in on everything included in the course or the benefits is like throwing someone who doesn’t know how to swim into the deep end of a pool. They’re not ready to make that next step.

  So, what will trip your visitors’ trigger? It all depends on you knowing the motivations, pain points, and hesitations your ideal customer brings to your website and addressing them in a way that resonates with that person. Figure out who that person is, and you’re halfway there.

  The lowdown on buyer personas

  Personas, avatars, whatever you want to call them, product developers and marketers have been using these fictional representations of buyers to make decisions on what to sell and how to sell for years. Based on customer research data, buyer personas are tools designed to help businesses understand who makes up their target audiences and what influences their buying choices.

  At least they should be. The problem with most personas is that they have been put together with either irrelevant data or no data at all. Instead of representing the buyer’s expectations, needs, wants, and concerns, many personas are built around a profile of what the business would like its ideal buyer to be. In other words, we’re talking about wishful thinking, not necessarily reality.

  A few years ago I began helping a local nonprofit organization market its resale shop online. I remember my first visit to the shop. Nice and tidy, it had all the trappings of a small retail store selling clothing and housewares. Volunteer sales associates bustled around helping customers and displaying newly received items.

  My first impression was of a homier, warmer version of Goodwill. All the donated items on sale looked to be in very good condition. Most of the folks shopping appeared to be people from the community that the larger parent organization helped support.

  So I was a bit startled when I found out who the marketing team identified as their ideal customer. The persona they described amounted to a woman in her fifties living in the highest rent district in town with discriminating tastes that leaned far closer to Tiffany’s than Target.

  “Is this who shops in the store?” I asked.

  “Not really. Except we do have quite a few volunteers who buy things,” one of them said.

  After more questions and multiple marketing meetings, I started to realize there was a profound disconnect between who the team wanted to market to and who their actual customers were. The core group of volunteers who spearheaded the creation of the shop had a vision of a high-end resale boutique. They would concentrate on taking in designer donations and cultivate a clientele with disposable assets.

  The reality was quite different. The shop didn’t look and feel like a high-end boutique, nor was it attracting the type of customers the marketing team aspired to bring in, which meant the messaging they dished out consistently fell on deaf ears.

  The buyer persona trap

  Unfortunately, the resale shop marketing team’s experience is all too common. Many businesses rely on creative thinking in determining their target audiences without learning how their customers make buying decisions. They pull out a stock photograph of a person who meets the basic demographics of their customers, slap a name on it, and off they go making assumptions about what drives behavior.

  It’s easy to fall into this trap. Go online and you’ll find templates, articles, and blog posts littering the web with illustrations of buyer personas that lean almost exclusively on educated guesswork and quantitative demographic data (e.g., gender, age, income). They may make for an interesting read, but they hold little value when it comes to informing what messages to put on your website or in your marketing. Age and gender can give you clues as to what’s important to your customers and help with segmenting your audience, but those kinds of statistics on their own leave out the why behind the action.

  How buyer personas relate to your voice of customer research

  So, why are we even talking about buyer personas if most of them are completely useless? As of the writing of this book, over a million results appear in a Google search for the term. A blog post I wrote on using quantitative and qualitative data to create customer personas has been shared on Twitter over 2,000 times.5 Marketers and businesses consider personas a tool worth pursuing and clearly find it a hot topic to read and write about.

  That’s why I feel it’s important to explain where personas fit into the process outlined in this book. Think of personas this way: when buyer personas are based on the thoughts, feelings, and stories behind how and why people make purchasing decisions, they are a representation of good voice of customer research.

  As Adele Revella, expert in buyer persona research, says, “Armed with verbatim quotes describing how buyers weigh their options and make a choice, marketers can readily find the sweet spot between their buyer’s needs and their solution’s capabilities.”6

  When you build your buyer personas without the guesswork, you’ll have a repeatable process to inform both your marketing and product development. In essence, it’s a similar process to what I’ll be showing you how to do here, but our focus will be on gaining insights to optimize the copy on your website. This means no spending time on picking out stock photographs or monikers for your personas (unless it helps you visualize them). Instead, you’ll map out what messages will give you the biggest retur
n on investment by asking the right questions and deftly interpreting the answers.

  What to do next

  Go to your website (or, if you don’t have one yet, pull up one in your industry) and ask yourself the following questions:

  What words jump out at me as soon as I land on the main pages of the site? Here’s a little trick. As soon as you open a new page, close your eyes, open them for five seconds, then turn away. Think about what sticks in your memory and what words your brain latches onto.

  Have I addressed more than only the surface motivating factors? Keep asking “Why?” (refer back to the weight-loss and exercise program example) and see if you have copy on your site that digs deeper into your customer’s motivations.

  What pain does my product or service fix? Notice how you write about the solution to your customer’s problem. Is it all about you and your fix, or is the focus on your customer?

  Where might a visitor to my site feel hesitation toward taking action? Look at the places on your site where you’re asking people to click on a button or fill in a form. Is the information you provide helpful to people making a decision, or is it giving them pause?

  How have you positioned the triggers on the page? Take inventory of your calls to action and try to look at them from your visitor’s perspective. Do they appear at the right time, or are you asking for too much too soon?

  Who appears to be the audience I’m speaking to? Make note of whether it’s clear in your copy and if those people differ from who you want them to be.

  These answers will come in handy once you’ve started talking to your customers and finding out what matters most to them. You’ll be able to see how your existing copy stacks up against your research.

  Chapter 2

  Asking the Right Questions

  In order to learn what motivates and pains your ideal customers, you will need to do a bit of research. If the word research intimidates you, don’t let it. I’m not talking about crunching numbers or worrying about statistics. Instead, you’ll be focusing on asking questions and gaining insights from the answers.

  To start, decide on the goal you are attempting to achieve. Without clearly defining what you want to learn, you may end up spinning your wheels. Or worse, you’ll turn your customers off instead of on.

  The importance of defining your goals and objectives

  Defining a goal for your survey or interview is critically important because it spells out what you’re going to do with the data you collect and why. Your goal gives you direction and serves as a constant reminder of what your research needs to achieve.

  There are lots of different goals you can come up with for doing surveys or interviews for your business. You may want to know what markets are best to expand into for a particular product or how satisfied your customers are with your support team. Whatever your goal may be, it needs to be specific and tied to a greater goal for your business. Otherwise, you may have a difficult time figuring out the steps you need to take to achieve it or how it will provide value to your business as a whole.

  For the purposes of this book, we want to develop surveys and interview questions to gain insights we can use to write more effective copy. How might that translate into a specific goal?

  Let’s say you are developing a new sales page for an existing high-end product. The current sales page has not been performing as expected, so you would like to better understand the value your customers see in the product. You have decided to send out a survey to get the answers.

  Your survey goal might be “to assess how customers perceive the value of XYZ product relative to the costs in order to write more persuasive copy on the sales page.”

  With this goal in mind, you are ready to identify your survey’s objectives. Your objectives consist of the learnings you want to gain from doing your survey. These are the bits of information that will help you reach your goal.

  These are examples of what your objectives might be:

  What are customers’ biggest hesitations to buying?

  How does the product make customers’ lives better?

  What motivated customers to seek out the product?

  Once you have your goal and objectives in place, determining what questions to ask will be a whole lot easier because you know what the survey needs to achieve and what you want to learn. The most important thing to remember is that every question should serve the same purpose: to move you closer to reaching your goal.

  Who to ask

  When it comes to e-mail surveys, reach out to customers or clients who have bought from you or worked with you in the last three to six months. Their purchases and your business will still be fresh in their minds. This means they’ll be more likely to remember their experience with you, your product or service, and your website.

  It can be helpful to speak with people who have yet to buy from you, too. For example, you may want to understand the challenges they are facing in their businesses and why they have not purchased from you yet. If you can segment your e-mail by prospects, send them their own survey with questions tailored to what you’re hoping to learn from them.

  Best practices

  #1: Keep the number of questions to a minimum

  Most people have a limited amount of time and patience, along with goodwill, when it comes to answering questions. In particular, this applies to e-mail surveys and on-site pop-up surveys. For e-mail surveys, keep the questions limited to a range of six to ten questions. You’ll want your website pop-up surveys to be even shorter, one to two questions max.

  You can glean quite a bit of valuable information from a small number of questions. Keep your survey short and to the point.

  #2: Stay relevant

  Make sure your questions are relevant to the task at hand. This brings us back to knowing what your goal is. Refrain from asking questions just because you’d like to know the answers. If they’re not going to serve your direct purposes, leave them out.

  For instance, I might want to ask small business owners putting together their own websites what they struggle with the most when writing their own copy. The answers to this question should yield some promising insights to help me write better copy for my book’s sales page.

  Asking these same people the question “What’s your favorite word?” would provide no value. Remember, you’re trying to get to the heart of your customer’s how and why. If your questions don’t lead you down that path, chances are they’re not worth asking.

  #3: Focus on open-ended questions

  When you’re looking for copy to swipe from your customers’ mouths, you need access to their actual words. This means keeping yes/no and multiple-choice questions to a minimum. The goal is to get people to express themselves as openly as possible.

  Let’s say you’ve created an exercise program for people recovering from back surgery. An effective open-ended question to find out the reasons why your recent customers bought your program could be “What happened after your surgery that made you purchase the program?”

  A question like this forces people to think about the circumstances around their choices and gives them more opportunity to elaborate. Suddenly, your customer is telling you not only that she wants to alleviate her back pain but also how that pain is affecting the overall quality of her life (e.g., she can’t play with her kids or walk up and down stairs).

  Voilà! Your open-ended question has given you a wealth of information about the benefits of your program.

  #4: Ditch the bias

  Repeat after me, “No leading questions.” Don’t do things such as including superlatives in your questions. Asking what your respondents think about your bright and cheery website design plants an idea in their heads about the site.

  Stay as neutral as possible in your wording to generate the most reliable answers. An example of a neutral question is, “How does reading this copy make you feel?” An example of a biased question looks like “How does reading this extremely well researched copy make you feel?” T
he first question asks without compromising the answer, while the second makes it nearly impossible.

  #5: Don’t make people think

  Steve Krug turned the phrase “Don’t make me think!” into a mantra for web designers everywhere.7 Just like good design and usability on a site, good questions should be easy to understand. If they are vague or overly complicated, chances are you won’t get the answers you’re looking for.

  For instance, the question “What types of online copywriting frustrate you the most?” might confuse people.

  Without including the words to write at the end of the question, respondents might think they are being asked what types of pages are the most frustrating to read. Their answers won’t help in the research process.

  #6: Get people to self-identify whenever possible

  Knowing how your prospects and customers think of themselves and the words they use to describe who they are or what they want to do on your site is critically important. For example, a colleague of mine and I wanted to know how the people coming to a client’s site classified themselves. We hypothesized that the client’s ideal customers and the majority of people coming to his site were beginner programmers, but we weren’t sure. My colleague included a question in an initial survey that asked people to choose the term that best described them: beginner, intermediate, or advanced.

  Finding out that the highest percentage of people thought of themselves as beginners helped us tweak the language on the site so it focused on their needs. This is a situation where including a multiple-choice question can work well.

  Best practices are helpful, but examples are even better

  So let’s get down to brass tacks. Here are some examples of questions I’ve used in e-mail surveys. The answers have been instrumental in helping me craft more effective copy on various pages, including sales pages.