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Goodwill v Anxiety

I found this post by Seth Godin interesting as it reminded me of some of our thinking from a few years ago on Persuasion Pathways. We talked about the fact that people came to your web site with a certain amount of goodwill based on their relationship with your brand and that is reduced by the amount of anxiety they felt when interacting with your site. When anxiety had reduced the goodwill to nothing they would leave your site and shop somewhere else.

Seth is using some different terminology but essentially this is a similar concept model. He is focusing on the size of the red zone and highlighting the fact that it is a dangerous time in the process and that you need an incentive to get through it, the green dot is the incentive and the size of it is determined by how big your red zone is. Worth a read on his blog.

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Onion Rings

Seth Godin recently published a post which included this diagram...

It was heartening as ever to see so much thinking summed in as simple way as possible which is of course the art of being an internationally famous marketing guru. However it also gave me a warm glow as we shared some thinking on the way web sites needed to work with Seth back in 2005. We arrogantly called it 3G web site theory as in third generation web sites (this was before the phrase web 2.0 was coined, we were always ahead of our time ;o) it was based on the idea that a web site had layers like onion rings which denoted how much access a user had a web site data and how that access could be controlled by user behaviour. As users downloaded assets, signed up for things, engaged in conversations so their access level increased until they'd reached the level of Superfan.

What goes around really does come around!

10,9,8,7,6,5...

When we started talking about the concept of landing pages it was on the back of stats around attention times and bounce rates which started appearing and transformed a lot of our thinking about the way web sites worked. The first number that struck a chord was 8 seconds, if you're page did not make an impression in that time you were rejected by the web-savvy browsing punter.

I now read that it's down to 5 seconds! No surprise that this number has gone down over the years but it's interesting to think that average internet speeds have probably quadrupled in that time, so actually browser's attention span has probably gone up in reality. There are many factors which influence this as well as speed of access, such as relevance, improved search results, optimised graphics, cleaner code and the increased experience of the browsing public.

On that basis check out this interesting new service: fivesecondtest.com. 

On fivesecondtest.com, you can post a screen shot of your landing page. Visitors who go to that testing site get five seconds to perform a test. Currently, fivesecondtest.com offers two kinds of tests:

• Memory test. The visitor gets five seconds and then has to type what he can remember.
• Click test. The visitor gets five seconds to click on areas of interest, and then must describe them.

You get a limited number of free responses. If you pay a small amount of money ($5 to $15), you get more responses and greater ability to customize your test. The downside is that the people who respond will not necessarily be in your target demographic, so if your business is a very, very specialized one, this tool may not help you. On the other hand, it costs no money and almost no time. It is a wonderful way to start getting feedback on your site.