Secret Tip: Delete The Useless

While it may sound like marketing advice from Forrest Gump, it's actually insightful marketing advise from Forrester Research. As originally reported in Internet Retailer, and reprinted and annotated by FutureNow, the study in question sought to discover why online conversion rates are still so low.

What they found is that (drumroll please...) the content on most sites is not helpful to the people visiting the site; and it's poorly written to boot.

In other words, most web sites are terrible salespeople. They don't identify or qualify their prospects and adapt to their needs or speak their language. Instead, most sites develop a pitch (their site content) and even though it fails about 98% of the time they don't take the hint and improve it.

Forrester suggests web marketers start by looking at their log files or analytics, and deleting all the content on your site that very few visitors bother to look at. That doesn't actually accomplish anything - other than opening up a few k of space of your server - but I suppose it's a nice ceremonial process.

The more important work is in improving the content users actually do see. Of course, that requires another Secret Tip: Add The Useful.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at July 30, 2004 11:25 AM