Is That a Coupon Box I See Before Me? If so, it could be hurting revenue

Posted July 27th, 2009, by Stephen Cobb

Image by CheyI want to ask you a question to which I don’t yet know the answer: If you have an online store, when should you display a coupon box on your checkout page?

Before you answer that, consider another question: Has this ever happened to you? You Google something that you want to buy, for example, “Adirondack Chair.” You see a promising link in the first few search results and click on it: “Voila!” you arrive at a site that offers exactly what you’re looking for, and at a fair price. You click “Add to cart” followed by “Checkout.”

Three cheers for online shopping! You are now just a few keystrokes away from cheerfully and efficiently completing your purchase. Then it happens [cue dramatic clash of cymbals]. Suddenly something troubling materializes before your very eyes: A box labeled Coupon Code. How do you react? Think carefully about your answer because it could be the clue to a whole bunch of lost revenue.

Personally, my first thought is this: “If I had a coupon code then that “fair price” could be even fairer.” Two other thoughts then fight for second place: “Is someone else–someone who has a coupon code–getting a better deal on this chair than me?” versus “Where do I get a coupon code?”

And if I act on either of those two thoughts, you can pretty much bet I will be leaving the checkout page, either to open a new browser window and search for a code, or to navigate back to the home page of the site to see if I missed something about a coupon.

Now, if you’ve been selling stuff online for any length of time you know this: You do not want people leaving the checkout page for any reason (except maybe to grab their credit card). Here’s why: … Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted in Industry, Personalization, Strategy, case study

Do Your Customers Get IT? False assumptions can undermine messaging

Posted July 15th, 2009, by Stephen Cobb

A few posts back I talked about how enforced brevity can sharpen your marketing focus (Trade Show Challenge: What do you guys do? In 20 words or less).

In this post I want to pass along another lesson learned at a trade show, this one about faulty assumptions (the lesson is about faulty assumptions, not the trade show, although that might make an interesting show, no?).

Obviously, faulty assumptions can impair your message delivery to customers and prospects. Almost as obviously, this can cost you money.

Let’s face it, nobody wants to push out a message through paid channels only to find that the recipients don’t “get” what you’re talking about. When that channel is the web, A/B testing can provide a sanity check for messaging and iterative testing can weed out false assumptions.

But regardless of the channel, you have to start somewhere, and fewer false assumptions in your starting point means you arrive at a clear and well understood message much sooner (and probably at less cost). Consider the key differentiator that I chose to include in my boiled-down, 20 word summary of Monetate: “Zero I.T.”

A few months ago we decided–purely on the basis of in-house A/B testing–to print “Zero I.T.” in big letters on our trade show booth (a marketing channel where live A/B testing is somewhat impractical) . I also had some buttons made that said the same thing but graphically. And therein lies my false assumption.

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Posted in Industry, Strategy