“Be sincere, be brief, be seated.” While some experts have dutifully penned entire tomes about this subject, the famous advice Franklin Roosevelt gave to his son about public speaking still resonates today for its stark honesty.
If Franklin Roosevelt 2.0 was giving advice about Internet marketing, he would probably change “brief” to “clear” (and perhaps “seated” to “testing”). While marketers invest the majority of their time and budgets on complex areas deeper down in the funnel, MarketingExperiments research has found that most of the gain from optimizing a website occurs in clarifying the first seven seconds of users’ experience.
Much of the complex analysis and formulaic methodologies used by our scientists to create optimized pages with triple-digit conversion improvements can be summed up in this truism…
Clarity Trumps Persuasion
The first seven seconds, and perhaps just those first three, are vital to clearly guiding your visitor into an inevitable conclusion to engage in a transaction with you. Below is a quick excerpt from a recent live web clinic in which Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS (our parent organization), discusses how your visitors interact with your website in those first few moments they land on your page…
Yet Difficulty Trumps Clarity?
Of course, so many websites produced by experienced, professional marketers don’t follow this simple principle because, in reality, it can be quite difficult to truly be clear. Put another way, what is clear to an insider (a marketer that lives, breathes, and eats his product every day) can be meaningless and confusing to your visitor. And even when you have every intention to be clear, how many monkeywrenches get thrown your way (Sales wants one thing, Operations another, and don’t even get me started on Legal)?
To help you on your journey along the road to clarity and prosperity, you can view a replay of the clinic or read the latest issue of MarketingExperiments Journal. Our next live web clinic, Maximizing your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain, will be taught on January 13th from 4 to 5 p.m. EST.
I share the awkwardness of my formative years because I believe that when it comes to social media, most experienced marketers are little more than brace-faced thirteen-year-olds staring at Twitter and Facebook like a poster of New Kids on the Block – you know deep-down a perfect marriage exists but just don’t know how to make it happen.
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If Mr. Assumption had actually listened to his wife more about what she would like, maybe he would not have had to spend four days pulling sofa duty as a result. While we all laugh because we either connect to the mistake of giving or receiving such a gift, we have to ask ourselves if we are making the same assumption errors.
Remember, these exit surveys do not have to be just for people that are abandoning the process. Query visitors that have successfully made it through your signup process, lead capture form, ecommerce purchase…you get the idea. If you have never dabbled in the murky art of exit surveys, there are 
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