The Pre-Commerce Blog

Do You Have Bush or Kerry Marketing Copy?

The New York Times Op-Ed page isn’t usually the source of online marketing tips, but today I found the following quote in an article comparing the speechwriting and oratory skills of Bush and Kerry:

"If you can't explain an idea or a policy plainly in one or two sentences, it's not yours; and if it's not yours, no one you speak to will be persuaded of it, or even know what it is, or (and this is the real point) know what you are."

This resonated with me because while visiting a number different B2B websites over the past few months I’ve noticed that it is often very difficult to figure out exactly what the heck the companies do or sell. The problem appears to be a combination of specialized jargon, incredibly vague benefit statements, a bit too much hype, and poor writing skills. I’m sure this results in huge numbers of people who visit the home page and leave just as quickly.

Entrepreneurs are frequently told that they need to have an ‘elevator pitch’ – the ability to completely and compellingly describe their business in the time it would take to ride an elevator just a few floors. The premise is that you never know when you’ll get a chance meeting with someone important and therefore potentially benefit by quickly telling them about your company. The reality is that just about everyone you meet has very little time, and the ‘elevator pitch’ is the best way to introduce anyone to your idea. If they like that, they may decide to commit more time in order to learn more.

Your web site is in the same position. Most visitors arrive with the intention of staying just long enough for a short elevator ride – unless they’re convinced to stay in those first important seconds.

So maybe your site can learn something from the communication issues of presidential politics. Ensure that your core ideas are ‘explained plainly in one or two sentences.’ By doing so, you have a much better chance that your visitors will be persuaded, they’ll know who you are, and they just might stay on the elevator long enough for you to sell them something.

==========
FULL TEXT - For when the Times archives the story
==========

In an unofficial but very formal poll taken in my freshman writing class the other day, George Bush beat John Kerry by a vote of 13 to 2 (14 to 2, if you count me). My students were not voting on the candidates' ideas. They were voting on the skill (or lack of skill) displayed in the presentation of those ideas.

The basis for their judgments was a side-by-side display in this newspaper on Sept. 8 of excerpts from speeches each man gave the previous day. Put aside whatever preferences you might have for either candidate's positions, I instructed; just tell me who does a better job of articulating his positions, and why.

The analysis was devastating. President Bush, the students pointed out, begins with a perfect topic sentence - "Our strategy is succeeding"- that nicely sets up a first paragraph describing how conditions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia four years ago aided terrorists. This is followed by a paragraph explaining how the administration's policies have produced a turnaround in each country "because we acted." The paragraph's conclusion is concise, brisk and earned: "We have led, many have joined, and America and the world are safer."

It doesn't hurt that the names of the countries he lists all have the letter "a," as do the words "America" and "safer." He and his speechwriters deserve credit for using the accident of euphony to give the argument cohesiveness and force. There is of course no logical relationship between the repetition of a sound and the soundness of an argument, but if it is skillfully employed repetition can enhance a logical point or even give the illusion of one when none is present.

The students also found repetition in the Kerry speech, about the outsourcing of jobs, but, as many pointed out, when Mr. Kerry repeats the phrase "your tax dollars" it is because he has become lost in his own sentence and has to begin again.

When he finally extracts himself from that sentence, he makes two big mistakes in the next one: "That's bad enough, but you know there's something worse, don't you?" No, Senator Kerry, we don't know - because you haven't told us. He is asking people to respond to a point he hasn't yet made and, even worse, by saying "don't you?" he is implying they should know what this point is before he makes it. As a result, the audience is made to feel stupid.

And if that wasn't "bad enough,'' consider his next two sentences. Up until now Mr. Kerry's point (insofar as you could discern one) had been that current tax policies reward companies for moving their operations overseas. But he goes on to add, "it gets worse than that in terms of choices." The audience barely has time to wonder what and whose choices he's talking about before it is entirely disoriented by the declaration that "today the tax code actually does something that's right." Excuse us, but how can getting something "right" be "worse"? It turns out that there is an answer to that question later in the speech - Mr. Kerry says that while the tax code now rewards companies that export American products, Mr. Bush wants to eliminate that good incentive - but it comes far too late for an audience discombobulated by the sudden and unannounced change in the argument's direction.

Senator Kerry, my students observed with a mix of solemnity and glee, has violated two cardinal rules of exposition: don't presume your audience has information you haven't provided, and always pay attention to the expectations of your listeners. They also felt that when he concludes by declaring that "when I'm president of the United States, it'll take me about a nanosecond to ask the Congress to close that stupid loophole," he undercuts the dignity both of his message and of the office he aspires to by calling the loophole "stupid" (instead of "unconscionable" or "unprincipled" or even "criminal"). "Stupid," one student said, is not a "presidential kind of word."

So what? What does it matter if Mr. Kerry's words stumble and halt, while Mr. Bush's flow easily from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph? Well, listen to the composite judgments my students made on the Democratic challenger: "confused," "difficult to understand," "can't seem to make his point clearly," "I'm not sure what he's saying," and my favorite, "he's kind of 'skippy,' all over the place."

Now of course it could be the case that every student who voted against Mr. Kerry's speech in my little poll will vote for him in the general election. After all, what we're talking about here is merely a matter of style, not substance, right? And - this is a common refrain among Kerry supporters - doesn't Mr. Bush's directness and simplicity of presentation reflect a simplicity of mind and an incapacity for nuance, while Mr. Kerry's ideas are just too complicated for the rhythms of publicly accessible prose?

Sorry, but that's dead wrong. If you can't explain an idea or a policy plainly in one or two sentences, it's not yours; and if it's not yours, no one you speak to will be persuaded of it, or even know what it is, or (and this is the real point) know what you are. Words are not just the cosmetic clothing of some underlying integrity; they are the operational vehicles of that integrity, the visible manifestation of the character to which others respond. And if the words you use fall apart, ring hollow, trail off and sound as if they came from nowhere or anywhere (these are the same thing), the suspicion will grow that what they lack is what you lack, and no one will follow you.

Nervous Democrats who see their candidate slipping in the polls console themselves by saying, "Just wait, the debates are coming.'' As someone who will vote for John Kerry even though I voted against him in my class, that's just what I'm worried about.

Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

To Blog Or Not To Blog

We're helping more and more of our clients start Business Blogs - primarily because they're great communication tools. It doesn't hurt that they can also contribute to the amount of organic search traffic generated by a site. Gerry McGovern has written an interesting article discussing the pros and cons of business blogging.

My favorite Pro: "Blogs have potential to help the organization develop stronger relationships and brand loyalty with its customers, as they interact with the ‘human face’ of the organization through blogs."

My favorite Con: "Like practically everything else on the Web, blogs are easy to start and hard to maintain. Writing coherently is one of the most difficult and time-consuming tasks for a human being to undertake. So, far from blogs being a cheap strategy, they are a very expensive one."

Bad Design Is Expensive

It's easy to wish your web site had a 'better design'. Or that it was 'more user friendly'. But many marketers have trouble getting past their dissatisfaction and moving into redesign, primarily because they find it hard to cost-justify the effort.

Jared Spool, one of the true usability kings, has an excellent article on this topic over at webpronews. Among other things, he shows one clear example of how to calculate the economic loss from bad design:

As an example, let's look at Amtrak.com, the official web site for America 's passenger railroad system. The folks at Amtrak have designed their site to allow customers to make reservations online.

Imagine we've observed during usability testing that Amtrak.com makes it very difficult to complete a registration. Only one out of every four attempts to book a registration online actually succeeds.

A quick analysis of the site's logs shows that the average reservation is for $220. It also shows that there are currently 10,000 reservations successfully completed every month, producing a monthly revenue stream of $2,200,000.

Our inspection of the site's logs shows the same patterns we see in the labs: only 25% of the people who start reservations actually complete them. That means that 30,000 reservations a month aren't completed. Using our average reservation, that roughly puts the monthly failed registrations at $6,600,000 or $79,200,000 a year.

That's a lot of money for Amtrak to recapture. However, our studies show that many of those folks won't actually register, even if the site was much more usable. The current design forces a potential traveler to start the registration process just to see what a fare costs or when trains run between two cities. Many of these travelers will go for cheaper or more convenient travel and will never register.

Therefore, we should estimate our frustration cost carefully, removing these "no-go" users from our estimates. However, we may find it difficult to predict the percentage of visitors accurately without knowing their purchase intentions. In this case, we'll conservatively estimate that only 20% of people who are not currently registering today would do so with an easier-to-use interface. (By estimating conservatively, we make it easier for others to put faith in our calculations while also allowing for the happy surprise of exceeding our goals.)

20% of our 30,000 uncompleted registrations a month is 6,000 people who we think will register with an improved interface. That means that a well-designed reservation system could increase revenues by $1,320,000 a month or $15,840,000 a year.

That means that the Cost of Frustration for Amtrak.com is almost $16 million annually. That ought to get someone's attention.

Over 75% of Email Marketing Goes Un-Opened

Information aggregated from clients of Bigfoot Interactive, as reported at Clickz, provide an interesting picture of email marketing today:

"The overall unique open rate has exhibited a year-over-year decline, dropping from 28.7 percent in Q2 2003 to 22.3 percent in Q2 2004, largely due to changes from e-mail providers, Bigfoot's DiGuido said."

The report is by no means negative on the current or future prospects of email:

""With the increasing attention to more contextually relevant e-mail communications we expect to see increased performance and perhaps more importantly conversion as a result of these efforts. Given the efficiency of e-mail this should have a huge impact on marketers overall ROI for the holiday season, as e-mail becomes an increasing portion of the marketing mix," DiGuido said."

Focal Points

A fascinating article today at Pointer.org reporting on a study of users eye movements when visiting news sites. The article shows how people look at pages on news sites, where there attention is drawn, what text they read and what text they skim, and much more.

Since this test was restricted to news sites, which have certain goals and generally follow certain design norms, its clear that the results do not generically apply to all web sites. But certainly many of the points made should be considered for all web sites, and more importantly this type of thinking is a good demonstration of how methodically you should think about what goes where on each page of your web site.

Users browse sites they don't completely consume them. Your web site has to be browsable and usable. This means ruthlessly prioritizing your information, carefully considering where things are positioned on pages, and most importantly testing and tracking your designs to make sure that users are able to accomplish what you (and they) want to - before they give up and just try to find it somewhere else.