Webpage Optimization: Back up your claims or don’t make them at all

ONE EXCEPTIONAL OFFER!!

SUBSCRIBE AND SAVE!!

HAVE IT ALL FOR HALF THE PRICE!!

These are examples of unsubstantiated claims that businesses make every day on the web and in print. They are vague, and they are irritating.

Marketer, if you are trying to get the prospective customer to decide to subscribe, to say "yes" to your offer, you shouldn't try to coerce them. Instead, help them move through an inference process.

The key to that is to give them a set of observations based on evidence they can process. Only then can customers arrive at a conclusion that precipitates a decision to buy.

Watch this three-minute excerpt from the University of Florida and MECLABS Institute graduate certificate program to learn how a newspaper's digital edition realized a 181% increase in subscribers by utilizing this key principle.

What conclusion precedes the decision you want the customer to make?

– Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO, MECLABS Institute

This excerpt is from Session 5 from MMC5259: Customer Relationship and Effective Lead Management course, part of our graduate certificate program offered through UF. The full session aims to introduce students to the unique and unprecedented nature of the web and how it can be used as a living laboratory to study the cognitive decision process of our customers and predict their future behavior.

Click here to learn more about the program.

Transcript

Flint McGlaughlin: There's a control. The page is original. You can see a number of claims, and they're unsubstantiated. One exceptional offer, what does exceptional mean? I mean, it's just copy dribble. Subscribe and save, right. But is there any reason why I should subscribe with you instead of anybody else? What does that really mean, and how much do I save? Now, have it all for half the price. Have all of what for half the price? Does any of this really move you?

Last week we talked about helping the customer, the prospective customer moves through an inference process, and we said the key to that was to give them a set of observations that they can process. When they process those, they're going to infer from them a conclusion, and we said that conclusion precedes the decision.

Now, step back again. Help me for a second. What is the decision this page is trying to stimulate? You know, this is a new way to talk about things you're probably very familiar with. So very clearly, we're trying to get this prospective customer to decide to subscribe. Now, by the way, to do that, we have to get them to decide to read the rest of the headline, to read the subheader, to interact with the copy below. I could continue.

There's a whole series of micro-yes(s). But ultimately, now, we want them to say yes and purchase. So that's the decision.

What conclusion — this is the question you can ask yourself that will really help you think —what conclusion precedes that? If you're starting to get it, let's take you a step forward and sort of help shape it again using the content that we've been learning.

So the new version lays in front of the prospective customer a set of observations. Now, there are only three here. You might say, "Is three enough?" Oh, three is ideal. All we want you to do is some basic math. That basic math involves 50% off the newspaper delivery, 12 weeks and that's a plus. Unrestricted access, that's a plus. Print delivery for as low as, so that's another way to think about the value. And I'm saving 60%.

Do you see what's happening? Every one of these points helps underscore that this is an unusual value. And there's an implication that it won't last forever, and it could even go with the next conclusion, "I better take advantage of this while I can."

This is how we did it. But what is it that we did? Well, if you look at the two side by side, you don't have to take our word for the framework. You can let the science encourage you, because the second version produces an increase. That's a tremendous gain in conversion, and it comes from operating not on the page, but on the mind. And the way we did that was working through the framework you've been learning in the first four weeks.

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