Results-Focused Online Marketing Strategies

I have a confession to make: I’m always a little nervous when I book airline tickets online. I’ve done it many, many times, but for some reason I always feel like I’m going to screw up my reservation and get stuck with the wrong tickets.

I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that I’m not the only person who feels this way.

With this in mind, let’s look at a huge conversion mistake I just experienced while buying tickets online from United…

I got through the flight selection process no problem (double checking my flights/times at each step), entered my credit card info, hit “okay” to purchase the tickets when the following (click to see full size version) came up:

So, this screen comes up and the first thing I see is the big, bold 932.51 when I had just clicked “okay” to a $584 total. My first thought was that there’s a mistake - given the prominence and the positioning of this price, it definitely looks like the price I’m about to get charged. Feeling a bit flustered, I started to read through the text and still was not immediately sure what the deal was.

Also, upon reading it and figuring it out, I began to doubt whether I should click on the “Purchase original itinerary” button. Taken literally, I was worried that it might truly be my original itinerary (I changed it a couple times while looking up the flights). Combined with the fact that the text above refers to the “current” itinerary and the text below refers to the “original itinerary” I definitely was not feeling too good about hitting that button.

Next, I found myself wondering whether I needed to “check” the “offer and conditions” checkbox. It kind of looks like you don’t need to, but on any other site I buy from you usually need to check such a box.

Plus, the page refers to you having to “Decline” the offer if you don’t want it. I didn’t see a “Decline” button anywhere, leading to further discomfort.

It also says it will expire in 5 minutes. Does this mean I’ll have to “rebook” if I don’t make the decision right away.

Furthermore, it’s a horrible offer! They want to charge over 50% more to upgrade ONE WAY on my 2 hour flight!

So, basically, United has taken someone intent on finishing a transaction, thrown in an unexpected/overpriced/confusing offer, and tried to add a sense of urgency to the whole thing.

Yikes.

At this point, I slowed down, determined that I was probably being paranoid and… saved a screen shot of this page so I’d have something in my defense if the wrong purchase went through.

What’s the takeaway from this? In the words of a manager I once had, “Once you make the sale, shut up! You only create opportunities for the buyer to change their mind.” This is great advice in this case. I absolutely guarantee that United loses sales with their confusing upsell tactic.

The lost sales may be balanced by the fact that United occasionally upsells the odd passenger to this ugly offer, but there’s another way to approach this. Why not make this offer AFTER they have made the original booking? If they offered this immediately after confirmation of the transaction they would remove all the risk of someone abandoning and there’s no reason why they couldn’t get the same amount of upsells (they could even keep the cheesy “expires in 5 minutes” part if they so desired).

The bottom line is to not try to accomplish an upsell before you’ve made the original sale, unless you can do it without risking the sale. United fails in this regard and damages their brand in the process.

OK, so “hate” might be a strong word.

Let me ask you though, are potential customers coming to your web site to be entertained or to gather information? Unless your answer is “to be entertained,” don’t waste your visitors’ time with Flash.

Reasons to avoid Flash:

1. While flash intros and pages may win design awards, they lose by being slow and harder to navigate than html.
2. Everybody’s in a hurry. Why would you make someone wait 20 seconds to get through an animation to find out your message when you could otherwise deliver it instantly? Show your visitors some respect!
3. Bandwidth hiccups can make you look stupid. Face it, even on a high speed connection you still get some connectivity ups and downs. Your Flash looks like crap if this happens before it’s loaded or during its load time.
4. It costs you money. I have yet to see a single a/b test where a Flash home page beat a static page in terms of conversion.

OK, now I’ve got that off my chest.

P.S. If you have a requirement that Flash can help you fulfill, by all means go for it. As a tool it can be brilliant - as a strategy it’s horrendous.

P.P.S. Yes, I know there are some great Flash web sites out there. However, they are almost all for brand oriented companies who don’t sell online (liquor, soft drinks, etc).

In building out a home page, many companies try to be inclusive and make compromises to satisfy all stakeholders within their organization.

Avoid this like the plague if you want an effective home page.

I know this sounds harsh, but the truth is that every additional item on a page that does not serve the main goal of the page ends up robbing from that main goal. With this in mind, you definitely want to reserve the bulk of your home page for the one or two main products/services of your organization, relegating the rest to much lesser prominence.

So how do we keep all areas of the organization/site happy and make sure they get appropriate promotion and exposure? Here’s some thoughts for different areas:

Customer Support
First off, anyone looking for support will definitely find it as long as you have a clear “Support” link in your top menu. Additionally, give Support a TON of prominence in any purchase confirmations, newsletters and customer communications. After all, nobody needs support until they’ve started using the product

Smaller Products and/or Sales Channels
“I know sales are still small, but how will we grow sales if we don’t put it on the home page?” This is a familiar refrain from product managers the world over.

That said, if a smaller product only contributes 10% of total sales, you’ll be losing money like crazy through the opportunity cost of giving it significant prominence on your home page. The solution: a keyword-rich mini-site or landing page devoted 100% to this product. This, combined with significant merchandising of this product to existing customers will garner significantly better all-around results for the product and the company.

Partner and Affiliate Recruitment
A link in your main menu will suffice for qualified partners and affiliates. If they are truly qualified they will have the insight and motivation to click on a menu link without other forms of persuasion being necessary.

Community and Resources
These are areas dear to my heart, but with the exception of specific circumstances (lead generating contests, etc), don’t usually deserve major coverage on the home page of an e-commerce site.

Communities and resources, like customer support, should instead be pitched hard to existing customers/members. As well, bear in mind that one of the huge values of community and resource sections is that they are a huge SEO asset, and usually generate the bulk of their new visitor traffic through search.

There are obviously times to break these rules, but don’t do so just to take the path of least resistance. If you stay true to these rules and only break them when there’s a clear business reason, your home page will be much the better for it!