The Simple Life

Less is more. Presenter Tim Ash, President of SiteTuners.com, made this point incredibly apparent at the latest in San Diego Ad Club’s Interactive Marketing Seminar Series.

Three keys to online marketing:
1) Acquisition: Driving traffic to your site.
2) Conversion: Providing a call-to-action.
3) Retention: Continuing a relationship with your visitors.

“Optimizing Your Conversion Rate” was the theme of the September 29th discussion, focusing on Step 2: Increasing the rate at which your site visitors take a desired action.

In order to increase your conversion rate, Ash says, you need to focus first on your site design. At this point he presented a Power Point slide of all the people who could have a hand in designing your site: marketers, web designers, president/CEO’s, I.T. guys. “Who should be responsible for your site design?” he asked as various answers shot around the room.

“Wrong,” he answered, “Your visitors should be.”

So how do you let your visitors control the content of your site? Simple, Ash says, you test, test, and retest. A/B Split Testing and Multivariate Analysis are two common ways of sending out different versions of your site to gather feedback from the public. But Ash warns that not collecting enough research will be your biggest mistake. Give yourself time to build up enough data to do a valid evaluation. Then, and only then, keep the elements that the data favors.

At this point, Ash asked for a brave volunteer from the group to receive some constructive criticism on his/her existing site. He pulled up a San Diego company’s domain (not linked here for to keep them from further embarrassment) and let us study it for a split second. Then, he quickly minimized the screen and asked anyone in the room to name this company’s call-to-action. Not one hand went up.

Ash demonstrates that you typically have a ½-second to grab your audience’s attention before they get bored or frustrated and move off your page. So, he emphasizes, less is more. Grab their attention by reinforcing key messages, but do it simply.

Look at the Google homepage versus Yahoo!, for example. With Google, there is only a white background with a search bar and very minimal copy. That’s it. No bells, no whistles.

After doling out this advice to the afore-mentioned company, he went on to instruct them to focus only on their top three constituents and include buttons linking to the bare minimum of what these people come looking for. In order to improve your conversion rate, you must say no to flashy, scrolling, multi-colored, wordy sites.

“Nobody wants to be told their baby is ugly,” concluded a tongue-in-cheek Ash. Simple, in this case, is definitely better.