To Press 2, Press 4: How To Prevent Your Ads (And Your Site) From Abandonment Michael Bannen CEO Connect.to Some ads actually work. Some ads attract my Attention, whet my Interest, create Desire, then move me to Action and to buy their product. (You remember AIDA, don’t you?) So I call their sales department to place my order and get… Voice mail. Who is the introverted, left-brained, reclusive techno-dweeb that invented this nightmare? Don’t get me wrong, voice mail is very convenient. It conveniently allows customer service reps to avoid taking my calls all day long. Not that I really want talk to anybody after I’ve tried to navigate the infinite number of options available in most voice mail systems. Every time I finish a round with one of these computerized voice labyrinths, I feel like I played Hot Cross Buns in touch-tones. If I can just get a good rhythm going I feel like I’ve accomplished something. I’ll hang up and start celebrating right then. "Maybe tomorrow," I boast, "I’ll take a run at something difficult like the cable company or Microsoft tech-support!" I’m sure there’s some university in the Southeast where you can get a Ph.D. degree in the pathology of voice mail system navigation. There are only so many options you can offer with a telephone keypad. Yet every day, millions of people are frustrated into hanging up because they can’t find what they want—or whom they want—fast enough. In call centers in companies around the world, it’s termed an ‘abandon-rate’--the number of people that called and hung-up before talking to anyone divided by the total number of calls. Executives understand that lost calls means lost customers, and lost customers means lost revenue and lost revenue means lost golf trips. Abandon rate is one of the most critical customer service factors a company can track. The higher the abandon-rate, the worse day the call center manager is going to have when the numbers are reported to the executives. Executives understand that lost calls means lost customers, and lost customers means lost revenue, and lost revenue means lost golf trips. I call it the golf-tier in Bannen’s hierarchy of executive needs. It's as real as any need I know. Strangely enough, these same execs who will spend countless hours debating every factor that has even a fractional impact on their call center’s abandon rate forget this important customer-service metric when it comes to their Web sites. Maybe it’s all the bright colors, moving pictures and mind-numbing index-finger aerobics. It can be hypnotic. But while these headmen exercise their index-finger on their mice and their egos on the golf course—hypnotized by links of every kind—they neglect the strategic issues of being easy-to-find, easy-to-use and easy to do business with on the Web. They abandon their customer-sense. To click here, click there What makes voice mail systems so fatiguing is the weary-go-round of button-pushing, waiting and transfers. "To speak to someone in the customer disservice department press star 9 with your left index finger bent backwards at a 35 degree angle while jogging in place." "To press 2, press 4." "To press 6 press 3 twice." "Thanks for calling our manual automated voice mail system. It was nice not speaking to you." It makes you want to go postal (in more ways than one). This teeth-grinding frustration we’ve all experienced when confounded by a voice mail system’s endless array of transfers and options is equivalent to the frustration web surfers experience when they visit most sites. "Click, wait. Wait. Click, click. Wait. Back. General Protection Fault (a.k.a. system crash). Scream. Aim. Fire." It’s voice-mail hell all over again. But on a web site, there are potentially hundreds of options that take minutes instead of seconds to skip through and discover they’re not what you wanted. "To click here, click there." Customer disservice in 216 browser-safe colors. When trying to attract or serve customers, waiting is death. Whatever it is that makes people wait will cause them to go someplace else, will cause them to abandon your ads, and your web site. Here are a few no-brainers that will help to keep you from being orphaned on the Internet: 1. Capitalize on the click. Not getting abandoned is one thing. But what you deliver in exchange for the clicker’s interest is what separates the clever from the committed. Clever will get you clicks, commitment will get you customers. If you’ve enticed me with a specific message about your services, your site, or your product, then take me right to that. Don’t tell me about the newest, coolest features of your lickity-split gene analysis software and, when I click on your ad, drop me at your front-page and make me search for it. Create a short, simple page linked to your ad that makes it easy for me to exercise my impulse to buy what your ad promoted. Developing this ad-linked page should be integral part of every ad campaign. 2. Minimize transfers. Consumer’s interest doesn’t appreciate with passing of the seasons. As soon as they feel like you’re wasting their time or there is going to be work involved in finding what they want, they’ll spring to another site. Don’t force them to click on (transfer to) too many pages. Provide a quick, clean and flat user-interface that makes it easy to access any thing and everything on your site with one click. Oh, they’ll come back, bring friends, and buy. 3. Skip the life-size navigational image map. Waiting for these to load is like watching Dick Clark age. You know it’s happening... it just doesn’t seem like it. A few professional images combined with creative use of colored table cells, text links and a Java script here and there can make your site as visually appealing as you want it to be. If you do feel compelled to bloat your site with an imposing image map, at least provide text links so those of us without a 10mb/s Internet connection can move on. 4. Shrink your images. Big images = slow loading pages. Slow loading pages = few visitors. Few visitors = few sales. Few sales = No job. Got that. Want that? If not, then you need to keep the size of your images to a minimum. Every second you make me wait is time I spend thinking about something else—usually I’m thinking about another site I can go to get the same information quicker. If I can think of one, I’ll abandon yours. Visit the Bandwidth Conservation Society’s web page to learn how to shrink your images or click your heals together and visit the Gifwizard who will shrink them for you. 5. Consider the image alternative. Even if users do abandon your ads before they load, all hope is not lost. You still have an alternative--alternative text that is. Alternative text is what displays in the place of images on a web page while the images are loading. This text is also displayed when users manually stop images from loading or set the default in their browser to not load images. These alternative text messages can be just as powerful and useful as those fancy, flashy, seizure-inducing ads you paid an arm and wing to have made. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a few well choose words might well be worth a click. 6. Underscore your ads. A recent episode of the C|NET TV show recommended setting your browser default to not load images. You know that at least some people listened. If you want to make customers out of those C|NET disciples, include a text link to your site directly below your advertisements. It creates yet another pathway into your site and it won’t cost you a cent. A No-Brainer Bonus Point. Do you usually wait for a whole web page to load before you start scrolling and clicking? Not me. As soon as I see something I can scroll to or click on I’m gone, which means I’m scrolling right past your ads. So here’s a tip. If you’re going to place an ad, or if you want to provide maximum exposure for the ads on your site, put the ads in a frame. Your customers will continually see the ad while they scroll through your site, and -- who knows? -- may click on it. Like I said, some ads do work. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - http://www.clickz.com/archives/120297.html - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -