Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [122]
A clear example of this is the old Miva home page (Figure 11-19a). The colors work very well together and are used in all of Miva’s advertising. However, the color red in a digital format is so intense and vivid that it grabs the user’s attention. When there are multiple words, objects, or images using red, the user will constantly scan the red objects, and the rest of the page tends to drop out. Users tend to look at red objects as important elements or action words, and any objects and text are subordinated.
Unfortunately, in this design, the call to action is white text in a light blue gradient. In conjunction with the red text, this creates the illusion that the rest of the menu labels are more important, because they are red and have more contrast, and the calls to action are less important, because they are presented in low-contrast elements.
The current Miva home page (Figure 11-19b) uses the opposite approach. Calls to action are red, high-contrast features, and the color red is used much more sparingly. The blue is used to highlight objects and more effectively uses contrast for better communication of important information.
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Figure 11-19: a) The old Miva presentation; b) the redesigned Miva home page
Thursday: Promote the Next Step
A level of customization is necessary to improve the business goals of your online marketing. Regardless of the ecommerce software or lead form generator/code that you have selected, the default settings are rarely the best settings. Every process that requires a visitor to click a link or go to another page is another step in a process. Each process needs to have its own call to action, not just the initial call to action but throughout the entire conversion process.
Provide Clear Instructions
One of my most interesting consulting engagements carried me to a company that was close to a civil war between the IT department and the marketing department. This company, we’ll call it Infighting Inc., was having growing pains because they were expanding their ecommerce presence and taking the necessary steps to streamline the process through inventory, sales, shipping, and advertising.
As I was auditing the process, I kept hearing the same story from the marketing department. They constantly complained that sales would be better on the website if IT would fix the website. They claimed that the site would break, and it needed to be redone and that the current IT staff just wasn’t up to the task. This was a consistent story and one that was even repeated throughout the company. Everyone pointed to the IT department as the culprit of the company’s inability to grow online.
In the audit that I performed for the company, my team and I found something very interesting. We found that we couldn’t break the site. No matter how hard we tried and all of the combination tests to see whether we could create errors and breaks, it just wouldn’t happen.
In our report to Infighting Inc., we asked the marketing department how many of them had ever attempted to purchase anything through the website. Not a word. In the four years of this company’s current website, no one from the marketing department had ever attempted to use the online shopping cart to purchase a product.
The following were the findings and recommendation of me and my team. The website was not broken, it worked well, and the programming was solid. What was broken were the instructions to users through the process and elements in the design of the cart that impeded progress. This was not an IT problem, because the function of the cart was fine, but a marketing problem, and the instructions and design were the responsibility of that department. The website was not broken; rather, the design of the process was broken, and users were unclear as to the steps,