Conversion

I love the idea behind NatureBox.com.  According to their About Us page

“NatureBox delivers a world of carefully sourced and nutritionist-approved foods right to your door. Each snack contains wholesome ingredients – with no artificial sweeteners, flavors or colors. Snacking has never been so deliciously fun and naturally easy.”

For a monthly subscription fee of $19.95 on up to $49.95 NatureBox will send you a selection of healthy snacks for you or your whole family.  I just joined at the $29.99 level, but I almost didn’t.

Recently I was going through my email subscriptions when in a Daily Digg email I read a headline that caught my attention.

“How to Snack without Eating Crap”

I quickly clicked the link and landed on this page

Now I am fascinated, but on this entire page the only option I have is the “Start Now” button.  When I click on that, I am taken to this page.

My obvious first question is “OK, but what snacks will you send? Can I select the snacks?”.  I’m about ready to bail out, but still intrigued I click on “select this box” because it is the only choice I have.  My thought is that I might find those answers in the next step.

This next page is even worse.  It clearly is the checkout process.  Pigs might go airborne before I complete a checkout process without knowing exactly what I am purchasing, and I am surely speaking for most mentally stable adults as well.

Now I can go on and on about how horrible this conversion funnel is, and I can nit pick several tactical things wrong with these pages, but instead I will point out this ‘landing page experience’ follows several commonly used marketing techniques.  It attempts to ‘squeeze’ out a conversion, by locking me into a single landing page and forcing me through a checkout.  This is not uncommon, and in some cases might be the most effective practice.  In fact, it might have even worked here had these marketers understood one thing, the context of a health conscious customer.

So let me whip up a quick Buyer Legend (buyer narrative) based on myself.

Over the past few years Anthony has tackled some severe health issues, and recently has become much more aggressive about his health.  He has adopted a rigorous workout schedule, and has made several major adjustments to his diet mostly cutting refined flour and sugars.  While Anthony has no problems making his meals interesting he has struggled finding snacks that he both enjoys and are healthy for him.  He is simply bored with nuts and berries.  He has spent hours in Whole Foods and other health food stores searching for a few more snacks to add to his diet to no avail.  He reads nutrition labels meticulously and watches his carbs and tries to eat organic as much as possible.  As he arrives at NatureBox.com his first order of business is to see what the snack line up is.  He finds several snacks and reads the nutrition facts for each. Anthony must find it easy to save the snacks he wants to a shopping cart or wishlist before he checks out.  

I am pretty sure when it comes to reading food labels, I am no different than most health conscious eaters.  When I went directly to the NatureBox.com homepage (as opposed to staying on the landing page I was linked to), I was able to peruse all the yummy looking snacks AND their nutrition facts.  The biggest problem I had was narrowing down my choices for my first monthly snack box.

So here is a word to the marketers  at NatureBox.com that paid for my click by placing a sponsored ad in one of my emails.  Gals and Guys, I understand why you did what you did, Your headline about not eating crap for snacks was brilliant.  If you were building a classic squeeze page campaign you did a great job. However,  the one thing you failed to do was understand my needs, and every other healthy eater’s as well.  I wonder if after you read the above Buyer Legend would you do the same thing?  How many people can you expect to sidestep your landing page urls?  And wouldn’t you like the credit for my conversion?

I’ll happily gift a copy to the folks over at NatureBox.com of Buyer Legends: The Executive Storyteller’s Guide just ping me and it will be on its way.

Dear reader, do you have your copy of Buyer Legends: The Executive Storyteller’s Guide yet? Your customers would love you to read it.