Tag: Thoughts

Are you easily distracted? No? Go check your browser history over the last 2 hours.

I thought I was super disciplined, methodical, and task oriented. Turns out, my browsing history betrays this self-image.

Checked your browser history over the last 2 hours?

Are you a little shocked??

If this is how distracted we are (and it’s scary to see) why would our site visitors be any different? Truth is, they aren’t.

Here is the bigger problem: This chronic issue of depleted attention has been on the rise for the last 10 years. What did irresponsible marketers do when they learned visitors who normally spend 5 minutes were now spending 3? They started cramming more on the page. The strategy was simple: cram down 5 minutes of content in 3 minutes.

This is stupid and there is a better way. Persuade the shopper to spend 5 minutes. Give them a good reason to spend 5 minutes. Minimize distractions so their 5-minute session is high quality.

Assignment for today. Identify an important page where visitors don’t spend enough time and answer this question, “How can we improve the quality time on this page by 20%?”

I’ll never forget the first time I understood the connection between site visitor data and conversion optimization (CRO). That was 11 years ago.

On November 15th, 2018 life took another turn. I attended a 2-day workshop by Bob Moesta for Jobs to Be Done (JTBD).

Jobs thinking isn’t exactly new. I read Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma in 2005. The book describes the famous McDonald’s milkshake insight. Watch this video:

It’s also not the first time I’ve heard Bob Moesta speak. I often share Bob’s condo story where he increased condo prices, added free storage + moving service, and ended up driving by condo sales 17%. Bob achieved this outcome by understanding the job condo buyers were trying to do. But it is the first time I fully acknowledged that conversion optimization without Jobs thinking is mostly meaningless.

I’m starting a new journey to fully understand Jobs-to-Be-Done from every angle. I’ll be reading a lot. I’ll be writing a lot. I’ll be thinking a lot.

What prompted me to look beyond A/B testing?

Trouble. Clients paid us to identify and fix site friction. A/B testing is a great program to make an existing page as good as it can be. We unearthed amazing counter-intuitive lessons about buyer psychology. Insights that gave clients an edge over the competition. But when I consider our impact beyond A/B testing I’m left disappointed. We haven’t been able to transform clients’ businesses inside out.

Hey, A/B testing isn’t bad. It’s an inexpensive way to start making scientific changes. It’s 100x better than not testing. But it can exclude the end customer from the process. Jobs thinking moves the spotlight to the actual buyer. In fact, Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) thinking doesn’t care about the product the business is trying to sell, it also doesn’t give a damn about the A/B tester (me). It only cares about the end buyer.

I still love A/B testing. I’ll still continue doing it. But I’m going to add JTBD thinking to our process.

I suspect everything is going to change, just like it did in 2007. If you’re interested in following our journey post a comment below and come along for the ride.

Have a great week.

Video explanation:

Written explanation for the video above:

If you want to improve your conversion rates, you’re going to have to understand the mind of the shopper. And if you want to understand the mind of a shopper, you need to understand how the shopper’s brain works. And in order to understand the shopper’s brain, I can think of one simple model that really simplifies our understanding. That is to imagine the brain as a two-part system: System 1 and System 2.

System 1 is impulsive and fast. System 2 is slow and methodical. Really, when you think about it from the perspective of a shopper, they’re always trying to activate System 2, because System 2 is what helps you see the world for how it is. System 1 is the way you see the world from the perspective of what your aspirations are.

I’ve thought a lot about a simpler way of explaining System 1 and System 2. Recently, while walking, had a breakthrough of sorts.

Think of System 1 as your finance department, and think of System 2 as your accounting department. So, System 2 looks at the world as black and white, just like an accountant does. Finance, on the other hand, is all about the future implication of an investment today. That’s exactly what System 1 is always focused on.

Again, this is not a perfect analogy because really System 1 does not look into the future, but I think the way System 1 makes decisions is more akin to a finance person, versus an accountant. So, let’s understand what is the difference between finance and accounting. If you would open a new retail store, let’s say that you knew that Santa Monica is a growing market and you want to open a retail store.

You’re going to have to spend a lot of money to open a retail store, you’re going to have to spend a lot of money to get licenses, you’re going to have to spend a lot of money to train people, and it’s going to take at least a year before the store is getting the right kind of foot traffic, you know, you’ve worked out all the kinks, you’ve trained your staff, all of that good stuff.

Now, from an accounting perspective that is a black hole. An accountant would simply look at your finances and say, “Look, you have spent one year on this location in Santa Monica, this is the rent, this is how much we’re paying for training,” and they’re looking at it purely from a cost perspective, and you will get one version.

However, the finance department will look at it differently. They will look at the growth of the demographics in the Santa Monica area, they will look at the trend lines for foot traffic, they will look at trend lines for returns, they will look at the impact of word-of-mouth, they look at all of these other metrics that give you an idea about the future, and likely draw a totally different conclusion.

So, that’s how you should think about System 1 and System 2. These are two different parts of the brain. Hopefully, this analogy has given a better insight into how System 1 makes decisions versus how System 2 makes decisions. If you have any questions, comment below and I’ll be happy to answer them.

If you don’t like watching videos here is the written version of the article. The things I do for my readers 🙂

Marketing has become incredibly powerful. Whenever you go to a website (whether it’s CNN or Walmart.com), often times anonymous aspects of our data are sold in the marketplace. The goal of this is to not release personal information but to instead stitch together certain aspects to determine purchase intent. We can use this information to market products effectively.

However, there is an ethical line that no marketer should ever cross because once you cross that line the whole point of marketing is lost. Let’s talk about it.

So what is the ethical line? The truth is we aren’t even fully sure what it is. There are certainly black and white aspects of what is wrong and what’s right, but there is also a gray area that makes it ever so challenging to determine the morality (i.e. can you blame Budweiser for an idiot who drank 20 beers and then drove extremely fast on the highway?).

I’d like to share a more black and white example that happened to me while on CNN.com. I saw an Outbrain ad and decided to click on it. The ad brought you to a website called SmartConsumerToday where they were marketing a CPAP machine.

After reading the article I wasn’t particularly impressed with it (as a marketer I am always thinking skeptically). However, what did impress me is that they had 347 comments and that seemed like a strong social proof element:

When looking at this comment interface you can immediately see the similarities to Facebook. Scrolling through the comment you can see that people were replying to comments, there was a top commenter, and even a follow button for each person. This is where the curiosity began:

The “347 comments” (seen in the first image of this article) is not actually a clickable element, meaning you can’t sort the reviews. Even worse than that, the comment box was literally just a screenshot, so you couldn’t even leave a comment if you wanted to! The buttons at the bottom of each comment (reply, like, follow post) aren’t interactive and the timestamps for each comment aren’t correct (I viewed this article in the morning and it’s now the afternoon, much more than 13 minutes ago).

Seeing this fake customer comment interface left me absolutely flabbergasted. This is a clear example of crossing the ethical line. Remember to be mindful of all the tools we have as marketers and make sure we are using them ethically.

Treat others how you want to be treated.