Conversion Archives - Page 2 of 3

Every customer wants a happy ending. For them that happy ending looks like a delightful buying experience followed by a purchase that meets their needs and exceeds their expectations. As a business you want happy endings too. And if you’re smart, you want the exact same happy endings your customers do. However, many smart marketers at good companies have reason enough to question this premise.

The Buyer Legends process will ensure that you can plan, execute, and optimize as many happy endings as possible.

When planning a customer experience it seems the logical place to start is at the beginning of the experience. But when you start there you are presented with unlimited opportunities to get you to the end, that is unwieldy. The beginning is also the point where you and the customer are the most disconnected. The most effective way to plan your customer experience is by starting at the happy ending and working your way backwards. It is reverse engineering a successful customer experience.

In my last article I gave you the ins and out of the pre-mortem, now we move on to the next step, the reverse chronology outline. In this part of the process you will be required to list every detailed step of your customers buying journey as well as their decision making processes along the way.

Most customer experiences are not planned, and to the extent that they are, they are typically some sort of conversion or sales funnel with the steps the customer must take plotted out in linear fashion. Rarely do real sales scenarios occur in this neat progression. In addition, the sales/conversion funnel metaphor is broken, it seems to assume that some sort of natural force like gravity is pulling your customers from the top to the bottom. Instead of gravity, what your customer needs is persuasive momentum to move her forward in the buying process. Persuasive momentum unlike gravity, is not a given or a constant. That’s why, when done properly, your reverse chronology will infuse persuasive momentum into every step of your customers journey. It will also take into account any friction in the buying process and help engineer ways to reduce and smooth it out.

What is a Reverse Chronology Outline

From the Buyer Legends book…

Outline the story using reverse chronology; start from the end of the story and work backwards. This reverse chronology process will:

Ensure your legend ends in success.
Emphasize cause-and-effect more effectively than forward chronology, as it will be harder to “fake” or rely upon momentum. Simply by thinking backwards you will naturally be more thorough in defining the actions and reasoning why your customer has taken each step on their journey.
Allow you to see and consider alternate, branching paths from your Pre-Mortem list and build in whatever interventions and detours might be needed.

You will want to reverse chronologies for each persona you have. I’ll be writing about personas in more depth in a future article.

As You Begin Writing Your Reverse Chronology

The first questions you must answer to get started is, what do you want the end of the story to be? I encourage you, if possible, to go a bit further than the mere act of the customer completing the transaction. Start with the customer being delighted with the product they just bought and work backwards from there.

To begin you simply list the steps the customer is taking, and why they are taking those steps. And of course, start at that happy ending, and work backwards.

The mere fact that you are writing this backwards will stimulate a different perspective as you begin to imagine the event/thoughts/feeling that must occur to propel the customer to step you previously outlined. Often times you may list some of the major events and realize that you missed something in between, in that case just go back in and fill in the details

Details matter here. In fiction, you can selectively skip some of the mundane details and in an instant your main character who was on Riverboat on the Mississippi is now in Cleveland wearing a sombrero with no details on how he got there. You can’t skip how he got there in your reverse chronology, every detail must be accounted for. Without those details you’ll lose your ability to measure and optimize your Buyer Legends.

Often times we’ve seen clients neglect listing the reasons why customers are taking action and only list the actions themselves. This is a gigantic mistake. Transferring the understanding of the customer’s mindset and intent to the entire team is critical to the Buyer Legends process, and if you don’t list it in the reverse chronology, that intent won’t make it into the Buyer Legend itself. That will cripple your execution.

Every step of the outline is either a cause or effect in the story. To get a better idea of how to think about how your outline reads watch a video Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park fame explain the difference between a bad and good story. What you’ll learn is why “and then” vs “therefore” and/or “But” make the difference between a good and bad reverse chronology. Buyer journeys are rarely a linear progression.

Your pre-mortem plays a key role in informing steps in your outline. Imagine how to overcome these problems and then weave them into your outline. As you work backwards you will find natural and common sense places where these items will seem to fit. Before you know it you are creating relevant and exciting steps that will enhance your customer’s experience.

Two Reverse Chronology Examples

We crafted two reverse chronologies one is e commerce and the other lead gen, notice how the above elements are present and how we used them.

Example #1 eCommerce

Feeling proud Jenny takes a picture of her new bag and posts it on Facebook and Pinterest (Notice how she shares her happy ending with friends?)
Jenny removes the backpack from the box, she thinks is it’s even more impressive than the website picture showed.
Jenny opens the shipping box with relative ease
As Jenny arrives home she sees the package on her front door, It must have arrived a few days before the website estimated, she hadn’t been tracking the shipment. (The company likes to beat estimated shipping times as much as possible)
A few hours later, Jenny receives the shipping notification
Jenny receives the order confirmation, she checks it and flags the email for easy reference
She feels comfortable everything is correct, Jenny places the order. She can’t wait for her bag to arrive.
As Jenny arrives on the final screen of the checkout, she double checks the product and all her information, she is thankful there is a zoomable thumbnail
Jenny enters her billing and shipping information, taking note of point of action assurances and secure checkout(The Pre-mortem suggested that Jenny is nervous about identity theft)
Jenny clicks around on the site a bit more but decides there is nothing else she needs or wants and clicks the checkout button
Jenny adds the backpack to her cart
Jenny watches a video of someone demonstrating the bag and all it’s features and benefits. (Notice how we are creating opportunities for creative to produce relevant content that will directly impact sales)
Jenny looks at all the gallery of photos for the back, and gets a sense of all the compartments. There are also several models that are wearing the backpack and this gives her
She also notices free shipping for items of $100, the backpack she is purchasing qualifies
Jenny sees that this particular bag comes in the exact color/design she likes
She reads the description thoroughly, and notices the price while still a little pricier than her last backpack, but it still seems like a value.
She clicks on a link in the article that takes her to the product page of that backpack
As she reads the article she becomes intrigued by one style backpack in particular
Jenny finds an article from a major tech magazine “Reader’s Choice, Best Laptop Backpacks”
Jenny does a Google search, “best laptop backpacks 2015”

Example #1 B2B SaaS

He is excited to start scouting locations and using IdealSpot.com
Mark fills out a form that asks for his name and email and password, he clicks Join and creates an IdealSpot account. (This is a conversion point that will be measured)
Marks sees that his privacy will be protected.
He clicks on the Get Started button, it explains to him the cost of each report, that he is setting up an account that will allow him to enter potential locations and request as many or as few reports as needed. He does not need a credit card right now.
Mark is sold and wants to try IdealSpot. Still believing the pricing is too good to be true Mark reads a section on the pricing page that explains how big data and learning algorithms dramatically reduce the cost of research allowing them to offer high value analysis and disruptive prices.
Mark wants to get a sense of a track record and he goes to the Success Stories page and reads a handful of stories from Ideal Spot clients who are having early success, he realizes that IdealSpot is a startup and their long term track record is not as established as it could be, but the low introductory price of $197 removes this barrier in his mind. (As a start-up their lack of undocumented long term success with their service is non-existent, and the pre-mortem identified this as a potential problem)
Mark reads about the algorithm and how the data is loaded for each location, and how the the clientele used to predict success are chosen based on competitors and his type of business. He see this is similar, even superior to the methods used by much more expensive location research alternatives. This information is exactly what Mark needed to hear about IdealSpot. (Notice how we are explaining his mind set as he moves through the outline)
Mark clicks through to the the IdealSpot.com “How Does it Work” page.
He reads about how big data is able to spot success patterns. It explains that most location analyses “hits the wall” when people become involved (and consultants like Buxton) and spend time and money collecting piles of data, but then have no way to relate it to success or failure of their business, and this is where big data and learning algorithms inject science into the process by mining through the data to pick out those patterns of success or failure and the key factors driving those patterns. The algorithms act without human bias; they start from scratch and come up with a model that is unique for each business and based purely on results.
Mark clicks on a link to a re-targeted blog post while he is on Linked in, the subject line “How Science and Big Data Are Changing the Ways Businesses Choose New Locations.
Mark, who is familiar with similar services and has spend tens of thousands on this type of research had looked into IdealSpot, he went to the website but didn’t get past the first page. His concern is that it will be just a whole bunch of computer collated data with very little holistic insight into his needs as a business. In other words it sounds too automated to be of real world use. (Mark is solution aware, see below)

What else you learn from a reverse chronology

You can see in these reverse chronologies also provide a list of content that needs to be created. Even more the reverse chronology also reflects items from the pre-mortem and that often identifies a need for powerful content that most companies haven’t even considered. This is a powerful Content Marketing planning technique.

Your reverse chronology is the girder and frame of your Buyer Legend. The more time you spend on details here, the less time you will spend on execution cycles. This is also the step that takes major decisions about the customer experience out of the hands of low level employees and places them on stakeholders themselves. It also helps to keep it out of the HIPPOs hands as well.

The Reverse Chronology also begins to document the actions you anticipate your customers to take, so we are beginning to build-in an accountability structure that can be measured and optimized.

Other things to consider in your Reverse Chronology

Not to make things more complex, but it is helpful to keep in mind both buying stage and the complexity of the sale you are trying to make.

Five Buying Stages

You have to realize that every customer is different and his level of awareness will also be different. The amount of persuasion your customers need will depend on their level of awareness. According to famous direct response copywriter, Gene Schwartz, there are five levels of awareness (as described in his book Breakthrough Advertising) –

The Most Aware: Customer is fully aware on the product, only wants to know the ‘deal’.
Product-Aware: Customer knows what you sell but unsure if it’s right for him.
Solution-Aware: Customer knows what results he wants, not sure if your product can provide him that.
Problem-Aware: Customer realizes his problem area but doesn’t have the solution.
Completely Unaware: Customer has no knowledge but has his own opinion and identity.

Four Elements of Sales Complexity

Understanding the complexity of your sale is critical to your understanding of what the customer needs along their buying journey.

I. Knowledge- How difficult is it for folks to understand the nature of your product or service, or the procedures for buying?

What do they need to know? Your persuasive process must eliminate the friction generated by confusion or lack of knowledge. Knowledge dimensions for the buying decision can differ based on who is doing the buying: is the customer buying for herself (she will be the end user) or is she buying on behalf of another (as in the case of a purchasing agent)? The knowledge assumptions and language – especially jargon – that work for one may be totally inappropriate for the other.

II. Need- How urgent is the need for your product or service?

How fast are folks likely to make their decisions to buy? Will the need be satisfied by a one-time purchase (either impulsive or momentous) or is the need on-going? Folks might be willing to compromise their thoroughness for a casual one-time deal. But if that one-time deal is something like a house, or if they are choosing a long-term relationship to satisfy an on-going need, things get significantly more complicated.

III. Risk. How risky, especially with respect to issues of finance or self esteem, is the sale?

While price may not be an ultimate decision factor in a purchase (for many, safety and trust trump price), increasing financial risk necessitates a more intricate persuasive structure. Risk may also be associated with compromises to health, as when individuals or medical professionals have to make treatment choices. Or even, for that matter, when someone simply evaluates the safety of an herbal remedy.

IV. Consensus. Just how many people do you have to persuade?

An individual? An individual and her significant other? Several end-users and heads-of-department? Your ability to understand who is involved in the decision-making process allows you to provide copy and content that appropriately informs, reassures and persuades.

How many reverse chronologies do I need to write?

Finally, as you use Buyer Legends to plan customer experiences you will quickly find that you can envision so many more reverse chronologies especially when you consider all the ways and places a customer can touch your brand. As a good rule of thumb start with your major channels, optimize them, and then get to smaller ones.

We encourage you to try this for yourself, but if you need help , please let us know.

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P.S. This is the second in a series of Buyer Legends Recipe Posts, please sign up to our newsletter for updates.

Recipes For Practical Customer Experience Design & Optimization #CRO #UX #CX

Anthony Garcia

Buyer Legends: How To, Conversion, Customer Experience Design, Marketing, Narratives, Personas, Recipe Posts, Storytelling, Uncategorized

If I gave you a recipe some of you would be thrilled and others not so much. You can cook a gourmet meal that will have your taste buds fox trotting. I know that to be true. When it comes to food there are alternative ways to acquire a great meal. However, when cooking up great customer experiences there are no alternatives. If you want customers to to tell the only story that matters, why they love your company, you’ll have to learn how.

Have you ever followed a recipe only to find that you aren’t ready for the third step? I have. The results? Frustration and a poor meal. A few years ago it was takeout or starve, but now, I love to cook. I credit mise en place, that’s French for having having everything in its place as you cook, for my conversion from takeout king to aspiring chef. Mise en place is a small amount of effort expended up front that actually saves me tons of time and guarantees tasty dishes.

The Buyer Legend process is like a recipe for designing great customer experiences. You can use Buyer Legends to define and improve your content marketing, social marketing, search marketing, conversion rate optimization and thereby improve your communications, execution and revenues. You just need to follow the recipe. We’ve published a basic Buyer Legend recipe but I’ll be adding more detail in this series.

I’ve been training clients and staff in the Eisenbergs’ processes’ for over a decade, Let me show you how to prepare mise en place for the Buyer Legends process. This is the first in a series of articles that will address each major step of the Buyer Legends process.

Pre-mortem because it is the antidote to Murphy’s Law

First we’ll explore the most impactful step of the process, the pre-mortem. Some of our largest conversion wins over the last two decades ever were the result of our clients going through the pre-mortem exercise. Murphy’s law states that everything that can go wrong usually will and a pre-mortem will help you spot previously invisible problems in your current customer experience as well as plan against future problems. But the pre-mortem step is not for the faint hearted as it may show you things about your precious baby that are not as attractive as you wanted to believe. The only thing that makes a pre-mortem more powerful is by doing a pre-mortem on a persona by persona and then scenario/ campaign by scenario basis. Read the first Buyer Legend Recipe Post here...

Reverse chronology because it explains conversions

Assuming you have a product or service worth buying then you and your customers have the same goal. You want to sell and they want to buy. That’s why when you are planning a customer experience it is always best to start at the end point and work your way backwards to the beginning. This step requires you to get very specific about how and why every decision and action needs to be taken in the buying journey. It’s specificity also makes this step important to measuring and optimizing your customer experience when you finally implement it. Your Buyer Legend isn’t fiction so every detail must be accounted for, not only that but you must create persuasive momentum at every step. Read it here.

Persuasive momentum because there’s no such thing as a sales funnel

Your customer isn’t truly in a funnel. There’s no gravity compelling them through your experience like there is in a real funnel. There is only the customer’s motivation and your understanding of that motivation to create persuasive momentum. Persuasive momentum is the progressive decision making process that aligns the customer’s goals with our own business goals. I’ll show you the three step test that will insure your customers’ experiences are always relevant, valuable and compelling. Read it here.

Personas because their motivations become your action plan

Personas are a common marketing tool, but their value is often misunderstood. Simply put, personas should inform you about exactly what you need to be doing. Personas can be elaborate constructs based on reams of research and data, or they can be constructed quickly with data and information at hand, but as long as they are directionally accurate reflections of a segment of your customer they can be powerful tools that will guide your Buyer Legends processes. I will be discussing how to construct ad-hoc personas as well as help you evaluate and if needed fix your current personas if you have them. Read it here.

Write a Buyer Legend because the only story that matters is your customers’ story

This is the step when you actually pull out your pots, grab a spatula and fire up your burners. I will tell you all the ingredients to include so you can have them at the ready. This is the step where all your previous work begins to pay off and when you’re done you will have an action plan that can be distributed, implemented, tested, and optimized. A Buyer Legend is where the rubber meets the road. Read it here.

Measurement because if analysts cannot tell the stories and business people cannot measure the stories then the strategy isn’t truly aligned with customers’ needs.

Your Buyer Legend isn’t fiction, it’s not for fun or for entertainment, or even for creative fulfillment. This is business, and anything important to a businesses success should be measurable and accountable. Buyer Legends are both and I will give you a primer on measuring, optimizing, rinsing, and repeating. Read it here.

The Buyer Legend process orchestrates your best efforts and reconciles them to the needs of your customers so you can create profitable customer experiences. If you want to become even more legendary at using this process I challenge you to follow this recipe series. I look forward to your feedback, questions, and hearing your success stories.

This series is now complete. Please visit all six posts.

As always, we encourage you to try Buyer Legends for yourself, but if you need help, please let us know.

7 Tips To Boost Your About Us Page’s Performance

Bryan Eisenberg

Communication Techniques, Conversion, Customer Experience Design

Does an About Us page really matter? You might think it matters more for B2C than B2B or vice versa. Carly insists that it does matter. We met Carly almost seven years ago when she was a Marketing Manager at a company we were consulting. We want to tell you the story she told us, after reaching out to thank us, about how a valuable relationship might never have started but for the content of a single page. Her company’s revised About Us page was launched despite concerns of the very private and exceedingly practical founder of her company.

Carly’s About Us story retold as a Buyer Legend

Carly is a wicked-smart, tenacious VP of Lead Generation for a mid-sized B2B SaaS provider. Carly’s no-nonsense approach to lead-gen has increased leads by ~30% since she took over in October 2013. Apart from the About Us page, Carly has redesigned the lead form, rewritten the product description, and worked with her ad agency on optimizing traffic. Carly also pushed through significant changes to the Home page, with copy targeted to entrepreneurs like Will.

Will is a diligent and savvy entrepreneur, shopping for the exact solution that Carly’s company sells. There were several strong competitors and Will collected all the data he needs. He narrowed down his choices to Carly’s company and the larger, more-established market leader.

Will likes both options. The market leader’s pricing is comparable, but has a slightly more robust feature set. Yet, he knows from user reviews and his co-founder’s experience, that the workflow is hard to master. Carly’s company solution has what everyone agrees is a more intuitive user interface and a magically simple workflow. It is also easier to deploy. However, it has fewer features, some of which might be useful in the future. Will is more-or-less comfortable that those are features he doesn’t need. From a cost-benefit perspective, Will thinks it’s a wash.

Will’s technical co-founder agrees that for their needs both solutions will do the job. However, he is more comfortable with the more established competitor’s technology. He implemented that solution at his last two companies and even though it seems to be a lot more work, it’s the devil he knows.

Carly’s company has a radically different approach to everything. If what they claim is true, not only will there be less work setting it up, but his team will use it. Will knows that hard-to-use tool sets require more training and are hardly used.

Will visits the market leader’s About Us page. It looks like most About Us pages. There is a generic-sounding mission statement, some stiff head shots of the executive team, Board members, and investors, along with all their credentials. It has a timeline and a list of awards. It was, as About Us pages usually are, perfunctory.

When Carly instructed her copywriter to tell the company’s story, it was to tell it through the eyes of the founder. The founder bootstrapped the company, putting every penny he had at risk. He had no investors because he wanted to build a special kind of company that led with its values without interference. The founder is disturbingly passionate, almost possessed by details. In fact, Carly chose to join this company over a higher-paying offer because, after interviewing with him, she recognized how rabidly committed he was to customers and how that commitment permeated the company culture.

How Will made his decision

When Will visited Carly’s About Us page he found information about the entire customer-facing staff. There weren’t just lists of professional credentials, but fun bios reflecting their personalities and style. There were pictures and videos that captured the mood and feel of the company. It made this company, selling a highly-technical B2B solution, sound fun and likeable.

That page tipped the balance for Will. The market leader’s page was stiff and corporate, exactly what made him leave his previous job. Carly’s company was inviting and human, and seemed a lot like his own company. Will felt sure that the company’s values would insure that they delivered. All other things being equal, Will finally had enough confidence to make the decision. The only company he called was Carly’s.

Carly won another lead, and then a sale, and Will has become an outspoken advocate for them. Will was so impressed with the About Us page that he contacted the CEO and shared his experience and asked if Carly would offer him advice about how to build a better About US page. She asked us to update our most popular ClickZ column about how to best create one, and you’re reading the update.

Not everyone will care. But for those who do …

Of course, not every prospective customer will visit your About Us page, but if it was the only thing standing between you and a lead or a sale, would it keep them in your funnel? Could it even win you the sale?

The About Us page is the most undervalued page on most websites. While it rarely closes a sale, it can provide a valuable assist. It is the one place where you are allowed to talk about yourself. Every click on the About Us page is someone asking you to tell them about you. Make the most of it.

Even if you sell something boring, maybe especially if you sell something boring, it doesn’t mean your About Us page should be boring. More than anything, your About Us page is the place to show customers who you are and what your company values.

Seven tips to create an About Us page that makes a difference

You might not use all of the seven tips but don’t skip the seventh tip. We encourage you to start with a Buyer Legend.

Let customers see a more human side of your company. Become more likable by including individual information and personal interest. Include fun blurbs and pictures of life around the office. Dropbox created a montage of its employees. While hovering over the pics, you are presented with fun personal facts about the employees.
1. Choose the voice of your About Us page. Here are some ideas that can help:
  1. What is the overall emotional stance that your company has towards its industry/market?
  2. If your company were an actual person, who would it be?
  3. Is there a favorite quote you or the people in your company have?
  4. Is there one particular moment in the life of your company that would capture its essence in a nutshell?
  5. Do certain words or phrases keep popping up in your daily conversations, your salespeople’s sales calls, your blog posts, etc.
  6. Use the verbiage your customers use. Mine your live chat logs, emails, customer service calls, in-site search, and especially customer product reviews, if you have them.
  7. As an exercise, do a “25 Random Things About Our Company”. Then, pull out the nuggets and insert them into your About Us page. Or leave the whole list as a link or tab from your About Us page.
  8. Make sure your voice on the About Us page is consistent with the rest of the site. Yes, you can afford to be a little more conversational and personal/passionate, but the overall writing style should be consistent.
Tell your company’s story. The story of why it exists and about the people behind it. Include links to the social profiles of team members.
1. One way to do this is to use a company history timeline. It is a great way to highlight achievements without braggadocio. Check out how Moz and Canva do this.
Connect people to your leadership.
1. Humans are attracted to humans, so why do so few sites include photos of company employees? Mail Chimp does an exceptional job at this.
2. Reflect your company’s passion. Cranberry shares their passion for News and PR Marketing.
3. Take it easy on the sales pitch and instead give your, and your company’s, story. Miles & Co, a SMB marketing agency, uses their About Us page to highlight their values and demonstrate how those values will benefit their clients.
Reflect your company’s personality. If you’re a fun company, your “About Us” page should be fun. Please don’t try to be fun if you’re not. Just be yourselves. Reiterate your company’s competence and desire to serve customers. Notice how New Relic embraces their inner geek.
Many About Us pages seem like a copy-and-paste job from AboutUs.com. Thinking any old creative will do, will not do. The vast majority of About Us pages are simply boring, stiff, and tightly-clenched pages. Put some thought into how yours is uniquely yours. Marketo’s About Us page is professional but not full of corporate drivel. Instead, Marketo makes a powerful statement about who they are and what they do.
Let the customer inside your company.
1. I highly recommend the use of video to show off your human side. Of course, it’s important to tell us what you do, but put that content on another page. When visitors click on About Us, they want to know about you.
2. Reiterate your company’s competence to serve the customers by using all the above tools. Zappos does a masterful job of explaining their company values and their dedication to customers. Google’s About Us page is just plain inspirational.
How to start: Writing a great About Us page is an exercise in empathy, and a Buyer Legend is a great place to start. You’ll need to put yourself in your customers’ place, take their perspective, and reflect back to them what matters most to them about you. Here is a recipe for creating a Buyer Legend.

When you write a Buyer Legend, remember that it is not the story you tell your customers; that’s just promotion. Buyer Legends are stories told from the point of view of your customers; because your brand isn’t what you say it is, but what your customers say it is. A Buyer Legend is designed to create and improve the interactions your customers have with every touch point of your brand, from the boardroom to the stockroom.

Buyer Legends are stories about your customers and their buying journey, and your About Us page gives you a chance to tell your story to the customer more powerfully from their perspective.

Would you like your customers to tell better stories about you than you do about yourself? Start planning your About us page with this Buyer Legends recipe. Buyer Legends a simple business process that helps you create a customer-centered, data-driven customer experience design that is supported by narrative.

We encourage you to try this for yourself, but if you need help, please let us know. .

Accountability Means You Win Big or Try Again

Bryan Eisenberg

Buyer Legends, Conversion, Customer Experience Design, Lead Generation, Marketing, Testing

Marie, the VP of Marketing, predicts that she can increase conversions to sales by at least 40 percent. She wants to conduct a series of disruptive experiments that make everyone nervous. Scott, the VP of Sales, is especially on edge. The lead-to-contract rate is already a respectable 7.1 percent for this not-so-new marketing technology B2B SaaS. If Marie is right, it’s a homerun. But if she’s wrong, Scott is predicting a debacle on an epic scale.

You’re in charge. Would you give her the green light? Please continue reading this post on the Salesforce blog

How To Test For What Matters

Jeffrey Eisenberg

Buyer Legends, Conversion, Team Dynamics, Testing

Gerald never imagined his 71 year old grandpa would be the one championing a shopping cart and checkout development initiative to both the CIO and the CFO. Gerald’s grandfather, Isaac, doesn’t carry a smartphone and handwrites notes on printed-for-him emails that he returns to his assistant. Isaac is the founder and CEO of a popular apparel catalog merchant that has been thriving for over forty years.

[Names have been changed to protect our friend’s privacy. The images you’ll see are to illustrate the points]

When Gerald was hired by Matt, the CMO who is a veteran catalog merchandiser, as the Director of Ecommerce at the company he knew that he would be under scrutiny. Matt demanded that any family members at the company be at least twice as good as anyone else at their job.

Gerald was indeed doing a great job but he was frustrated. His team had spent almost a year optimizing the shopping cart. Due to Matt’s catalog company pedigree placement and copy were seen as THE critical variables. They tested and retested the placement, color, shapes and sizes of buttons. Gerald fought hard to eliminate a step and two required form fields in the checkout. The shopping cart and checkout were streamlined. Yet they only realized minimal success with conversion improving 17% from 2.89% to 3.38%.

Matt urged Gerald to turn it up a notch and run even more tests. With little confidence that more testing would improve results and a shortage of new actionable testing ideas Gerald could feel himself between a rock on one side and a hard place on the other. Gerald knew their shopping cart was lacking features that many apparel sites had but knew any changes that involved significant development time and resources so the investment would be difficult or even impossible to push through. He obviously couldn’t play the grandson card either and he was sure his Luddite grandfather would side with Matt who after all was responsible for all that web stuff.

Yet a few weeks later here he was, watching grandpa convince his C-suite colleagues. The best part? Grandpa, the Luddite, was making a passionate case for a technology change he couldn’t have cared less about before.

Understanding Gerald’s dilemma

Neil Patel wrote about “7 A/B Testing Blunders That Even Experts Make”, and explained in Blunder #3, “Expecting big wins from small changes”;

“If small changes are providing huge gains, something else is wrong with your design or copy. The conversion wins that small changes provide typically don’t hold.

The biggest conversion boosts are going to come from drastic changes. So, if you really want to move your conversion rates, don’t focus on small changes. Instead, focus on drastic changes, as they are the ones that boost your revenue.

When you are starting out, you could try small tweaks to your design and copy to see if your conversion rates increase, but eventually you’ll need to focus on the big wins.

What I like doing is to focus on the drastic changes. Once I feel I’ve maximized their potential, I then focus on the small changes.”

What Patel is describing is the inclination that most companies like Gerald’s have. They test variations of individual elements instead of trying to identify variables that might move the needle. Perhaps this happens because of how testing software is designed to work. Yet, 90% of their tests yield little to no results and it is discouraging.

Gerald knew that continuing to do what he was doing would give him the same result . He knew they should be making changes but didn’t know exactly where to start.

Then Gerald met with me at a conference and we spoke a few minutes. He was intrigued by the idea of the book we were working on. I sent him an early draft on the promise that he wouldn’t share it but that he would provide feedback after he went through the Buyer Legends process.

Below is the portion of one of Gerald’s Buyer Legends that start at the Add to Cart phase of the story. The legend describes the current experience, the possible variation tests, and then a variable test. Please take note of how the likelihood of impact is described in the Legend itself.

Testing Legend – Add to Cart –> Checkout –> Confirm Purchase → Confirmation email

The current experience:

“… Pat clicks the Add to Cart button and is taken to the Checkout page. She looks over to the right and sees the Checkout Now button, and clicks on it. Pat notices that that prominently to the right of the form fields, the company addresses her privacy rights next to her billing and shipping information. Her security is addressed right next to the billing information. Pat feels reassured and comfortable filling out those fields, so she does. Finally, she sees her order and the prominent Complete Your Purchase button. Underneath the Complete Your Purchase button, she sees in a contrasting color one last reassurance; a 100% money back, no-questions-asked guarantee. Pat clicks and confidently completes the purchase. Pat notices when she receives her confirmation email..”

This is a reasonably good customer experience.

Here are some potential variation tests that might improve results:

“… Pat clicks the Add to Cart button and is taken to the Checkout page. She looks over to the right and sees the Checkout Now button and clicks on it. Pat notices that prominently [test copy] to the right of the form fields, the company addresses her privacy right next to her billing and shipping information [test copy]. Her security is addressed right next to the billing information [test copy]. Pat feels reassured and comfortable filling out those fields, so she does. Finally, she sees her order and the Complete Your Purchase button [test copy, button size, color etc.]. Underneath the Complete Your Purchase button, she sees in a contrasting color one last reassurance; a 100% money back, no-questions-asked guarantee. [test copy] Pat clicks and confidently completes the purchase. Pat notices when she receives her confirmation email..”

There are likely small but valuable wins in improving copy and perhaps even a button test. However, do any of these changes fundamentally improve the experience?

Here you’ll see a potentially important variable to test instead:

“… Pat clicks the Add to Cart button and is taken to the Checkout page. On the Checkout page, she confirms that it’s the right item (there is a thumbnail image), the right size, and the right quantity.She looks over to the right and sees the Checkout Now button and clicks on it. Pat notices that prominently to the right of the form fields, the company addresses her privacy right next to her billing and shipping information. Her security is addressed right next to the billing information. Pat feels reassured and comfortable filling out those fields, so she does. Finally, she sees her order details, exactly as she saw them in her shopping cart, and the Complete Your Purchase button. Underneath the Complete Your Purchase button, she sees in a contrasting color one last reassurance; a 100% money back, no-questions-asked guarantee. Pat clicks and confidently completes the purchase. Pat is thrilled when all the information,including the product detail with thumbnail image and reassurances show up in her confirmation email exactly as the appeared on the Checkout page.”

Did you notice the hypothesis embedded in Gerald’s last legend?

The hypothesis is that when at the point of greatest cognitive dissonance, placing the order, we should reassure the buyer in every way that they are getting the right thing. Because of the large abandonment rate at this step Gerald was confident that testing it would impact conversions significantly.

Gerald was a bit surprised when Matt told him he shared the Buyer Legends with Isaac. It seems Matt found Buyer Legends a useful way to communicate with Isaac. His grandfather was committed to testing this and anything on the site that would “help make things clearer and less confusing for our customers”.

Gerald shouldn’t have been surprised. Isaac had kept the company viable in up and down times driven by his relentless commitment to the customer.

Before reading Gerald’s Buyer Legend Isaac had always considered the online business as simply an evolved function of operations and cost control; much less intimate than his baby the call center. The Buyer Legend helped him empathize with his customers and he was able to begin examining the web site as an opportunity to better deliver on the company’s promise to the customers.

The ecommerce business went up 29.4% over budget this holiday season. Gerald tells us that a significant part of this is due to using the Buyer Legend process.

The takeaway – are you testing too much for too little reward?

If 90% of your tests yield little to no results and you’re discouraged there is hope.

You may not sell apparel but I hope you can see how using the Buyer Legends process helps to provide the customer’s perspective. It delivers an empathetic jolt of context and relevance to your entire team. Use Buyer Legends to identify the most important variables; then you can make incremental improvements by testing variations.

We want to hear about your success with Buyer Legends. If you’d like to learn more, please read Buyer Legends: The Executive Storyteller’s Guide, look into our trainings or if you don’t care to go it alone we’re always here to help you.

How a Social Media Agency Increases Conversions

Jeffrey Eisenberg

Buyer Legends, Conversion, Customer Experience Design, Marketing, Narratives, Personas

It’s 10 o’clock on a Friday night and you are at the bar. George Clooney strolls in and sits down at the bar. After a long while George retreats, leaving the bar head down and alone. You look over and see Scarlett Johansson alone despite greeting every man that passes her way. She leaves the bar looking rejected and pathetic. And then “the most interesting man in the world’ walks in, takes a seat, orders, and he is unceremoniously delivered a 48 oz can of Bud Light.

Now imagine how you would feel watching that scene. That is exactly how we felt when our friend Dennis Yu told us he was struggling to convert leads in his new business venture.

Dennis Yu is a social media marketing rock star. Dennis is a sought after speaker, works with impressive brands, is wicked smart, and is one of the nicest guys we know. Dennis is also a customer data ninja, and is one of the world’s most formidable Facebook marketers.

Dennis offers high end services to his big name clients, but he also co-founded and serves as CMO/CTO for a company called BlitzMetrics making his expertise more affordable and accessible to SMBs. BlitzMetrics provides a simple solution for smaller scale businesses to manage the complexities of their social media marketing. In the spirit of full disclosure,we are a BlitzMetrics. client so we have experienced first hand how easy it is to get started. And, of course, we have been thrilled with the results of our campaigns.

BlitzMetrics’s Conversion Challenge

After talking to Dennis we were surprised to learn how many well qualified leads never got started. We knew that the price couldn’t be the issue, their credibility is high and we found the process of onboarding painless and simple. There was absolutely some conversion challenge none of us understood.

We offered to take Dennis and his team through the Buyer Legend process. Dennis had read our book and was starting to do some preliminary work. Anybody can do this process alone but we wanted to make sure it happened quickly and correctly. When we got Dennis and his team on a conference call and began by polishing up his ad-hoc persona. The persona of a potential client was unlike us, and that’s the point. The persona was the CMO of a click and mortar SMB with less digital experience who pressed for resources and time. That perspective was truly unlike Dennis’ or our own.

We performed a pre-mortem for the Persona, a step many are tempted to skip but is mission critical. In a pre-mortem we list all the things that can go wrong during the customer’s buyers journey. We think of it as inoculation against Murphy’s law, “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.” It is essential to figure out what could go wrong. How else can plan for everything to go right?

We followed the pre-mortem with a reverse chronological outline. That is where we detail every step of the Persona’s ideal customer experience by starting at the conversion point and working our way backwards. Part of the exercise is to both think of the actual action steps the customer must complete as well as outline their thought process as they approach each step. It’s a bit like programming, miss a step and your result will vary.

We then wrote a Buyer Legend together, you’ll be able to read it below. We’ll also point out what innovations and process optimizations came out of it.

Dennis Yu’s A-Ha Moment

It wasn’t that long into our two-hour call Dennis had a powerful a-ha moment. There was an awkwardly long silence and Dennis blurted out “Oh I see!”

He shared what he saw with us after the call:

“We’ve been so focused on mining data, generating reports galore and micro campaign optimizations, that we’ve lost sight of the fundamentals.

We neglected why people come to us and what the experience looks like wearing their shoes. Our inward myopia created barriers to customers who want to buy from us.”

This simple business process is designed to help the marketer get inside a customer’s head triggered a paradigm shift for one of the smartest marketers we know. Dennis is a naturally intuitive and empathetic marketer. He only needed a few simple exercises to realign his conversion efforts. He began to see the gaps and the roadblocks in his current customer experience to understand how he can patch them up.

Dennis had found his conversion mojo.

How The Process Delivered Insight

To give you a little more insight into the process let us share just a few of the bullets from the pre-mortem.

She gets confused and walks away because it is too much of a hassle to figure it out

She doesn’t understand exactly what BlitzMetrics does.

She is unclear about her package options

She has sticker shock

It was during the reverse chronology when Dennis began to reconcile “What could go wrong” with “What is going wrong” that he had his a-ha moment. The fog cleared, the scales fell away and he was able to see and think through how to prevent these things from occurring. The final Buyer Legend reflects, in narrative form, exactly how BlitzMetrics is building an optimized customer experience for Diana and other potential customers with similar buying styles.

A BlitzMetrics Buyer Legend

Here is an abridged version of the Buyer Legend that we wrote together. It tells part of the story of the persona named Diana, a 43 year old CMO for a small Gourmet Pie chain. Diana comes from traditional marketing and is trying to get a handle on the digital aspects of her job.

Diana is hoping that when she contacts BlitzMetrics they will be part of her solution, not just another problem. She was impressed with Dennis’ presentation and knows he is really smart guy, but she isn’t sure what BlitzMetrics does. For that matter, she’s not really sure what Facebook marketing is either. It helps that Dennis took her card he told her “we’ll take care of you.” He wouldn’t be the first vendor who disappointed her, but she is hopeful.

BlitzMetrics follows up within 24 hours of Diana meeting Dennis and invites her to find out how they can help her. They offer either a quick call to answer her questions or to do some due diligence with her so that they can produce a proposal. She doesn’t want a call, she’s too busy, and asks for some more information. She gets it immediately.

She is thrilled to see it contains not just the clearest explanation of what BlitzMetrics does but it includes some thumbnail pictures of what the deliverables look like and a wide range of pricing. The wide range of prices lets her feel at ease that pricing is not being hidden and hopeful that there is Goldilocks service for her situation. At the end of the presentation, it has a prominent call to action that tells her to request a detailed checklist of what needs to be prepared for her to receive a customized proposal from BlitzMetrics.

Diana loves how helpful the checklist is, so she shares it with the team that needs to implement it and requests another call to go through it. BlitzMetrics organizes that and doesn’t assume anybody has seen the original presentation so they go over it briefly. She appreciates how easy BlitzMetrics is making her life and how they’re making her look good.

Once Diana receives the proposal, amazed at how quickly it came and how thoroughly clear it is, she has a final meeting with Steve and Rob, the CFO, to explain that the service costs are fixed but the media costs will be variable. She shows them how BlitzMetrics helps contain costs and can demonstrate accountability. They’re impressed with the professionalism, understand what they are buying and are ready to proceed. Steve sends the contract for legal review but is prepared to proceed.

Did you notice that the idea of sending her information (as opposed to pushing her into a call), detailed checklist, and transparent pricing are a direct result of what we did in the pre-mortem and reverse chronological outline?

What Came First, the Process or the Rock Star?

The Buyer Legends process while simple, is also powerful in it’s ability to force the marketer into the minds and hearts of the customer. It’s only in their minds and hearts that he can resolve their conversion challenges and then communicate what needs to be done to the execution team.

And it doesn’t matter if you are the George Clooney or Scarlett Johansson of marketing the Buyer Legends process can up your game, or get you unstuck. If you are still looking to become a rock star, try writing your first Buyer Legend and see what it does for you.

Go ahead read the book, or let us know and we will be happy to help you.

Designing The Perfect Funnel

Jeffrey Eisenberg

Conversion, Customer Experience Design, Storytelling, Strategy, Uncategorized

You’ve planned the campaign or the test.

You’ve designed the checkout or registration.

You’ve invested time and energy.

Now your customers come along and enter your funnel.

Let’s get real, your customer isn’t truly in a funnel. There’s no gravity compelling them through your experience like there is in a real funnel. There is only the customer’s motivation and your understanding of that motivation to create persuasive momentum.

Your customers’ journeys are their stories, NOT funnels. They could tell you the stories, just try asking them. And those stories don’t always have happy endings.

Your customers’ stories end happily when they are delighted. And for them that may mean buying from you or from a competitor. It’s simply a matter of perspective.

Now you come along and interrogate your analytics to find out what your customers did.

Is this process so very different from what you do?

The most successful companies start with the story from the customer’s perspective. Their business people make that story accountable through analytics. They anticipate what needs to be measured in order for the analysts to understand the actual customers’ experience – did their stories end happily? These stories are then shared with the business people and they learn what needs to be optimized.

Here’s what we know for certain: if analysts cannot tell the stories and business people cannot measure the stories then the strategy isn’t truly aligned with customers’ needs.

It’s time to perfect your concept of a funnel.

Buyer Legends can help you create customer-centered, data-driven customer experience design that is supported by narrative.

H/T to Tom Fishburne for inspiring this post with his marketing funnel

Storytelling to Improve Communications, Conversions, and Execution

Anthony Garcia

Conversion, Storytelling, Team Dynamics

From “Buyer Legends – The Executive Storyteller’s Guide” …

“Humans have only one tool capable of communicating the subjective experience of relationship through time, and that’s narrative. Ask someone about a favorite possession, and you’ll hear a story. Ask them about a friend or spouse, and you’ll hear a story. There simply is no other way to talk about relationship. And that goes for the relationship between customer and company (or brand) as well. “

You and I are wired for story. Period.

This is not just a powerful insight into our nature. It is profound and fundamental to our ability to communicate our experiences with one another, and as it turns out, ourselves. Thorin Klosowski over at Lifehacker writes

“A story is a tool to help us make sense of the world. But what about the future? What would happen if you turned your to-do list into a story as a rehearsal for the next day? Personally, it’s helped me not just Get Things Done, but also boosted my memory so that I’ve been able to ditch complicated to-do lists and schedules for good.”

Klosowski then dives into the storytelling process he uses to increase his productivity. Pretty cool, and pretty powerful.

What is good for productivity is even more powerful for improving the communications, conversions, and execution of your marketing.

Grab your copy of Buyer Legends – The Executive Storytellers Guide and in the half hour you’ll invest to read it you’ll learn how to create customer-centered, data-driven customer experience design that is supported by narrative.

How Extra Space Storage (NYSE: EXR) Uses Buyer Legends For CRO

Anthony Garcia

Buyer Legends LLC, Conversion

Who Are the Storytellers Behind Buyer Legends: the Executive Storyteller’s Guide?

This is the first in a series of interviews with marketing executives who have read the book and are putting the ideas to work for their businesses.

Today, we chat with Melissa Burdon, Director of Marketing Optimization for Extra Space Storage (NYSE: EXR) and winner of the Direct Marketing Network 2014 40 Under 40 Award.

Good day, Melissa. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today. First of all, can you tell us a bit about what you do as Director of Marketing Optimization at Extra Space Storage?
I’m responsible for reaching established goals within a testing-centric culture for the customer acquisition process across all platforms and channels including desktop website, mobile website, email, click-to-chat, call center sales, and various social media and customer-facing apps.

What are your short-term marketing goals?
Our primary goal at Extra Space Storage is to increase rentals of storage units. We drive reservations of storage units through the web and call center and then follow up with these reservations via phone, email, and SMS to improve move-in rates.

In 2014, we’ve focused more heavily on optimizing the buying experience through the entire customer-buying funnel based on who the customer is and what they are looking to accomplish. Data has given us some tremendous insights into who our customers are and how to give them the experience that effectively drives them to converting. But we know there is so much more to learn about our customers and so much more we could be doing to create a better buying experience for them.

What did you think of the ideas presented in Buyer Legends: The Executive Storyteller’s Guide?
The ebook was very enlightening. It’s based on a simple concept. We really just need to put ourselves in the shoes of our visitors and actually walk through the buying experience they go through in order to identify the holes and opportunities that exist. The difficulty has always been how to come up with a process to achieve this. The Buyer Legends ebook is this missing piece. It outlines the steps you need to take to effectively put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer and actually walk through their buying experience to look at your marketing efforts through their lens. Once you’re able to identify the opportunities that exist, then you can take these pieces and begin optimizing the experience.

Do you plan to use the process at Extra Space Storage?
Absolutely!

We’re applying the process to four projects at this point within the marketing department. We’re applying Buyer Legends for a social branding video, a few on-site content pages, one of our main buying funnel pages, and an acquisition email campaign.

How do you believe the Buyer Legends process will help you reach your goals?
We know the Buyer Legends process will help our department approach our optimization efforts based on what matters to our customers, first and foremost, rather than what matters to our sales process. The Buyer Legends approach allows our employees to put themselves in the customers’ shoes and see the experience from their perspective. This will help us achieve a higher number of rentals at the end of the day because we’ll be answering the questions our customers have at the most critical points of their buying process.

Have you shared it with your team/staff? What was their reaction?
I shared what I learned with our CMO and he completely sees the vision and even thinks that once we prove this out in Marketing, that this is something we need to train other departments on because this affects Operations, Learning and Development, as well as many other departments.

Once I got the thumbs up from our CMO, I put together a small group of 4 employees; our Email Manager, the Brand Manager, the Content and Social Manager, as well as our Optimization Manager and did a half-day Buyer Legends training for them. They were all expected to take on their assigned project and use the Buyer Legends approach to create or improve the campaign.

Do you see things any differently after reading the book?
I always knew it was important to see things from our customers’ perspective and focus on them rather than our sales process but it has always been difficult to actually approach making changes to specific campaigns based on what we know about our customers. The Buyer Legends ebook gives you a step by step guide on how to achieve this.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking to improve their results through every channel the customer is exposed to.

Thanks, Melissa!

As more readers share their success stories with us, we’ll tell you about them here. Have a story you would like to tell, contact us. To get started creating your own Buyer Legends, grab a copy of of the book Buyer Legends – The Executive Storytellers Guide.

All The News About Buyer Legends

Anthony Garcia

Buyer Legends LLC, Conversion, Customer Experience Design

This week over at LinkedIn, we shared some data from a Kapost study about the critical role content is playing in marketing strategy and how Buyer Legends can pull all your disparate content efforts into a cohesive and accountable customer experience.

Murray Newlands over at Inc. explained how the Buyer Legends process can be used to hack your growth.

How your organization prices products and services tells your customers a story about your brand, in this post you can read how J.C. Penney learned this lesson the hard way.

Anthony shared an example of how simply telling a story using a series of banner ads can have a nice impact on conversion. And we also wrote about how Steve Jobs built a legendary brand story and how after 30 years, that brand story is still exactly the same.

Bryan Eisenberg wrote about the future of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) for eConsultancy.

Today is also the last day to grab a free copy of Buyer Legends – The Executive Storytellers Guide. Currently the book has 52 5 star reviews, for a overall 4.9 star rating and it hit #1 in Marketing.

Your support means everything to us, thank you!

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Testing Legend – Add to Cart –> Checkout –> Confirm Purchase → Confirmation email

The takeaway – are you testing too much for too little reward?

How a Social Media Agency Increases Conversions

Designing The Perfect Funnel

Storytelling to Improve Communications, Conversions, and Execution

How Extra Space Storage (NYSE: EXR) Uses Buyer Legends For CRO

All The News About Buyer Legends

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