Is clicking through to your
website worth my time? If I give you
that personal information, what do I get in return? Is the price you are offering good enough
for me to create yet another account?
These are the types of
questions your customers will be considering in relation to your online
business. I call it the effort/reward equation.
Quite simply, the effort/reward equation is the calculation we all do in
our heads to decide whether the effort required (our input) is worth the reward on
offer (the product or service you are presenting).
When effort > reward
Upon visiting your website,
customers who find themselves thinking “too hard, too slow, too complicated, or
too invasive”, will abandon the process because effort is exceeding reward.
When reward > effort
Customers who think there is
a fair exchange of their effort for reward will do business with you. Take it a step further and exceed their
expectations and you are on the path to a long and loyal customer relationship.
If only simple was simple
Sounds simple, doesn’t
it? Just make your website easy and
you’ll be fine.
But so many websites get it
wrong. Take the exhausting text-heavy, content overloaded Telstra website
layout in Figure 1 below for example. We can only imagine the discussions by committee that went
into the development of this customer-facing shocker. The rewards better be big
to offset the effort required! In contrast, look at the easy to navigate,
highly visual Optus page in Figure 2 where effort and reward are in balance.
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| Figure 1. Telstra Mobile phone website |
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| Figure 2. Optus website |
Applying Behavioural Principles to reduce effort
To ensure you minimise the
effort side of your effort/reward equation, you should utilise two significant
behavioural principles; our aversion to loss and our drive to complete.
1. Overcoming loss aversion
We are geared to avoid the
pain of loss more than we are built to seek gain so if your sign-up page or
shopping cart gets too hard (loss of my time and effort), the gain (product)
won’t stack up and the process is likely to be abandoned.
Tallying the reward
As you think of your website,
write down the ‘reward’ a customer gets by dealing with you. Go beyond the product features, this should
include every reason a customer benefits.
It could include prestige, security or peace of mind, convenience, discount,
quality and/or satisfaction of ticking something off their task list. Wow, maybe you should charge more?! But wait.
Tallying the effort
Now write down anything you
are asking the customer to give up – their time, mental space, patience,
personal information, alternative suppliers, money, other ways to spend their
money - in order to do business with you.
A bit harder, isn’t it? We tend to forget that our customers put in
emotional, physical and mental effort when making a purchase decision and our
job is to reduce this.
Customers need to gain more than they
lose
Now that you’ve an idea of
what a customer has to give up in order to gain the reward, here’s the bad
news. The gain has to be significantly more than the loss because our aversion
to loss is much stronger than our willingness to seek gain. Significance will depend on your product but
be guided by common sense. If it takes me 10 minutes to troll through your
cumbersome website to save $10, then it’s not worth it. If it takes me a minute
to fly through, then we’re in business.
2. Give customers a running start
We are driven to complete
things that we’ve started, so make starting really easy! There are some things
you can do to help.
- · Give customers a head-start by pre-populating as much data as possible (eg email address, item they have been interested in). Check out www.amazon.com to get some ideas.
- · Chunk the process into steps and let your customers know how easy it will be to complete them. Visit www.groupon.com to see a great example.
- · Let them shop your site before having to sign-up. Once they’ve found something they like, that’s a great time to capture their desire for the reward (product) with a simple shopping cart experience. www.styletread.com.au is site worth trying for its cart process.
- · Structuring the process so it does not appear to be burdensome.
For example, compare being
faced with a fairly lengthy sign-up page for Gmail in Figure 3 (www.gmail.com)
with one that is structured in sections that reveal themselves in a cascading
fashion in Figure 4 by Aviary (www.Aviary.com
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| Figure 3. Gmail signup |
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| Figure 4. Aviary signup |
When you sign-up with Aviary,
you are asked only for Username, Email and Password, making
it seem a much less complex experience than Gmail. Then, once you’ve typed your email, the rest
of the fields subtly reveal themselves.
By this stage you’ve committed yourself to the process, have already
completed half of the form and are therefore highly likely to continue.
Your role in balancing effort and reward
If you are in marketing,
sales or own your business, chances are you have spent most of your time
thinking about the customer’s reward
side of the equation. Now is a great time to revisit the effort you are asking of customers because effort is ultimately what
determines the customer outcome. Keep it
simple and you will reap the benefits for your business.
Interested in finding out more? Email me at bri@peoplepatterns.com.au for an obligation free chat about your business.
