Friday is "Coffee and Bagel" day for me. A white toasted bagel with cream cheese to be exact. See, I figure after a working week it's nice to treat myself to an easy, simple and delicious breakfast, right?

I really look forward to that bagel and its creamy cream cheesy cheese goodness. It's sorta like a mini-christmas day on friday - it makes me get up a little earlier and walk to work with a spring in my step.

And so it was that I bounced down the hill and into my coffee shop (they have the best bagels in North Sydney), rolled up to the counter and stopped. I ordered.

The lady took my order cheerily, then turned to her colleague. "Hey, are we still out of cream cheese?"

My mind entered a state of panic. No cream cheese was almost a deal breaker for me. So I waited anxiously for an answer.

"Yeah we are. Would you like butter instead?" She happily asks me.

My brain snapped back: "No-i-don't-want-butter-butter-sucks-on-a-bagel-you-silly-person-i-want-cream-cheese!!!!" But those words didn't make it to my mouth.

"Ummm..." I replied. I'm sure I looked pretty upset. "Ummmmmmm...." I looked down and resigned myself to butter on my bagel. "Ok."

The counter lady continued to serve me, taking my change and passing my order along. I was distracted, wistfully thinking about how much better my day would be with some cream cheese in it.

Just as I took my change, she says "Hey, we're sorry about the cream cheese. Next time have a drink on us, ok?" She passes me a free drink voucher. Now while  this may be pretty standard, I was surprised and thanked her.

I was suddenly a lot happier. I still missed my cream cheese, and my Bagel wasn't quite as good. But a simple gesture like that turned me from a disgruntled customer into a happy one. And more importantly, I will go back there next friday, in the hope that they have cream cheese once more.

Two important things to note:

1. She made the decision to give me that voucher herself.
2. The gesture didn't give me cream cheese, but it did improve my mood.

Which makes me wonder - in your business are you:

1. Giving your front-line team the power to make decisions that make a difference?
2. Giving your customers something extra when you disappoint them?

And finally, the most important lesson: A token gesture and saying "sorry" really does get you a long way.

Sometimes, human beings are incredibly simple animals. When we're upset or angry, we're usually in our basest, simplest state. And that means that it only takes simple gestures to start making it just that little bit better.

Every marketer understands their target market, but how intimately you understand them varies. Getting involved with customer support teaches you a lot about your target market, and lets you intimately understand their needs, wants and motivations.

You'll learn not only what they want to use your product or service for, but why they want to use it. You'll learn the language they use to describe it and how they see it. There is no better way to hold a mirror up to your company than to talk to your customers about their experiences with your product.

Take Carol, for example. Carol is a customer of ours that I've helped on a few occasions with technical support. And she's taught me a lot about our market - while some of it isn't news, it's confirmation that our approach is correct. For example, here's a few things I know because of my support interactions with her:

• She needs support. Free technical support and the ability to talk to us during our support Q&A webinars is a big reason that she loves us.
• She loves to learn. She's constantly exploring and learning more about functions in the system she could use, and she really appreciates our business advice (not just tech advice). This has influenced our blog's direction and our technical documentation's direction to include a little background, too.
• She didn't know what a CMS (Content Management System) is. She just works on her website. This isn't a surprise and we don't use that acronym ourselves, but it's a good example of how you can glean knowledge of how customers talk and understand your product.

These traits are common to a large chunk of our market, and there are many more. We've got several customers that we have interacted with over time, and they've become archetypes of our target market.

So after all your effort doing support and customer service, let's say you've gained a deeper understanding of your product and your target market. Now we can put that to work in our marketing messages.

Creating a More Authentic Message.

After my experience with customer support, I've definitely gained a great deal of understanding about our product and our customers, and I would expect that most marketers would find the same thing. Doing support at GoodBarry, I can say that I have:

• Better understanding about which features our customers use the most
• Greater appreciation of the areas of the system are easiest to use and which are harder.
• Knowledge of the strengths of our products, according to the customer
• Better understanding of what motivates and excites customers

Now your product or support may be different to GoodBarry's, but I would bet that similar benefits would be gained anywhere.

To put it simply: I can see the product in it's true form, as it really is - not in an academic light. This then feeds directly into our marketing messages, making them far more authentic for our audience.

So how can you create a more authentic message?  By applying those lessons you've learned from your time with your customers. By using that authentic experience and true understanding you gain from dealing with customers after they've purchased, you can create marketing messages that:

• Set the right expectations - just as my laptop technician did.
• Communicate the most attractive benefits of the product - as Carol has shown us
• Better motivate your prospects to buy - by using the language the customer uses and the benefits they find most attractive in real-life usage.

And most importantly, these marketing messages are true and authentic - so they don't disappoint.

Word of Mouth Marketing That Sticks and Stays.

The best thing about authentic messages: customers repeat them. If they don't agree with your message they'll make up their own, which may or may not be favorable to you. But if they do agree with you, they'll just repeat your message. It's easier that way!

Real marketing messages that aren't mere puffery and positioning but true representations of the benefits of your product spread smoothly and are accepted easily. Authentic marketing messages are a big part in successful word of mouth marketing.

Some Caveats and a Final Word

Maybe you're involved in customer service every day, and if so that's great. My primary role is as a marketer, but I'm also involved in support and training at GoodBarry. And I'm confident that this has helped improve our product and hone our messages.

Of course, not everyone can do support or customer service. Technical support in some organizations requires some serious knowledge that marketers might not have. But what you can do is sit next to them, listen to their customer calls or read their support tickets. Maybe you can pull the support team into your next marketing meeting and see what they think of your ideas.

Traditionally, marketers have worked with sales and legal departments, but the customer service team is too often ignored. These guys are at the forefront of dealing with your happiest and unhappiest customers, they know your product inside out and can tell you in five minutes the best and worst things about your service.

My key point is that as marketers, you should engage and understand the customer service side of your business. Talk to them, sit next to them, try doing their job for a day or two.

Trust me, it's worth it.

Marketers, Lawyers, Politicians. These three groups are often accused of misleading people by spinning tales and moonshine. Marketers in particular are known for their ability to spin tales about anything. We're known for the ability to excite and amaze, grab people's attention and keep it for a while. That's our job as storytellers.

So what happens when the story you're telling isn't entirely true? The lights fade and some people buy and then they learn after a while that you sold them on a story that wasn't entirely real. At best these people will be mildly disappointed. At worst they'll be downright angry. In either case, they will not listen to you again.

Marketers now face the toughest, most cynical audience ever - and it's largely our own fault. The above scenario has happened too much and too often, as we've exaggerated the benefits and hidden the flaws of our products in an effort to sell ever more.  As banner click through rates continue to decline and most ads being largely ignored, we are becoming more and more desperate to cut through the noise and make an impact.

The Authentic Marketing Message

If there is any lesson from the advent of Web 2.0 and the rise of "New Marketing", it's that consumers are people; they like to be engaged and they like to be told the truth. In regaining the trust of consumers it's time to sit back and be a little more honest. To cut through the noise and make an impact, we need to create more authentic marketing messages.

So what's the best path to do this? How can we create a more effective marketing messages and product promises that resonate with the consumer that the customer willingly spreads?

I'm suggesting a novel approach that we use at GoodBarry: get you and your marketing team to help out with customer service and support.

Get Involved with Customer Support.

Whatever that is for your company, get on the front line and get involved. Do some tech support, some phone support, some front desk customer service. Hear the real voices of your real customers telling you their real thoughts.

There are two reasons you should do this.

Get "Real World" Product Knowledge.

Most marketers do understand their product and what it does. Unfortunately, this isn't really the complete picture. Real product understanding comes from knowing more than the specifications, size, color and so forth. You need to know how the product is used in the real world and what the stumbling blocks are in the wild.

Which parts break most often? I remember a laptop I had once had a broken keyboard. When I called the support line and started to explain what I needed, the technician said "Ah, no problems. You need your keyboard replaced, we'll send someone out. The keyboards are easy to replace, it'll only take them a moment."

Apparently, people's keyboards on this laptop were always falling apart! The support technician knew this and knew how to take action. I'm sure he passed this on to the manufacturing department, but the point is - he knew the stumbling blocks for his product and he knew that the modular design meant it wasn't going to be hard to replace. This was a big plus, since I couldn't afford to not have my laptop for long.

By getting your hands dirty with customer support, you get to see your products in the wild, being used or consumed by real people. You'll see what they complain about, what they really love and what they hate. You'll begin to see your product through your customers eyes and understand its flaws, limitations and qualities.

That’s it for this time – next post we’ll follow up with the second reason that marketers should get involved with customer service!

We live in a world where first impressions are made in a matter of a seconds. Our lives are completely saturated with media and our response to this information overload is to 'thin- slice' the information to sift through it quickly - we're relying on an almost sub-conscious decision making process because we don't have the time to weigh up all the facts and figures.

Don't believe me? Think about your email inbox, you'll glance at the subject lines for only  tenths of a second before binning it and those emails never get given the benefit of the doubt. What about scanning your news aggregators, RSS feeds and even somebody elses blog, how much does it take to make you consciously click-through or even just scroll past the first fold?

That's right! You might've spent a huge deal of effort on your website content and probably lots of money to have it beautifully designed but the attention you pay to your news aggregators is exactly how much attention you're getting from your first time visitors.

Your website is competing with everybody else's website for a smaller and smaller slice of your visitors time to make an impression. And if that first impression doesn't engage you've lost that visitor forever. Despite your teachers indoctrinating you in elementary school with the old saying 'Don't Judge a Book By Its Cover' it's what we find ourselves doing more and more...

Ok, enough of my doom and gloom, I'm not saying we should give up designing websites. There's hope - with a combination of good design and useful content you can make sure that your home page has the best chance of not bouncing visitors by following my 5 small business homepage design guidelines. (By bouncing I mean they're leaving your site straightaway)

1) Your homepage needs to add value. Immediately.

The homepage is not a company information page. I see a lot of small business websites making this mistake. As a visitor I need to be struck with how you are going to add value to my life.

A spiel about how long your company has been around for, how many employees it has, its mission statement - these are all meant to be locked safely away in the 'About' page that I'll click on later when I want to, after I've seen everything else.

Your website isn't 1990s brochureware, it should be a 2008 interactive portal or close to it. I want to see your products in action, I want to know how they can help me, I want to see a portfolio of your work, I want to see what others have said about you, I want to see what you can do for me - not necessarily all at once but you should have 1 or 2 of those elements on your home page.

2) Keep your homepage really simple, here's an example. 

See how Apple does it on the first fold of their front page. Ok so you don't have the marketing budget or Apple's famed reputation but the point is you'll confuse the visitor if you stuff too much content on your homepage. As with presentations, simple is beautiful, your homepage is a presentation of your business.

Some web designers seem to think the way to get around homepage bouncing is to put the whole site on the homepage with a mashup of multiple special offers, product information, company profile, multiple advertisement banners - one at a time they might be good, but jumbled altogether it's a case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts!

Ask yourself, what is it about your products or services that you want to draw the visitors attention to first and *focus* on that on your homepage.

3) Sparingly use obvious calls to action.

So you want people to click past the homepage? You're allowed to use some calls to action (not too many otherwise you break rule #2) including but not limited to a limited offer banner advertisement, a free trial button or a 'find out more' link for your visitor after they've digested the correct sized portion of interesting content on your homepage.
 
4) Make sure the site navigation is available and obvious

This ties back to having obvious calls to action. A lot of sites have fancy flash homepages or homepages that are graphics heavy which are hard to navigate (where the hell do I click to move on?). My recommendation is to make your horizontal tab site menu available even on your homepage. This is the current site design trend and it's one you should follow because everybody who surfs the net understands this navigation protocol.

5) Regularly Update Your Home Page

And make sure your visitors can see it's being regularly updated. They'll return if they know there's some fresh interesting content to gobble up the next time they come giving you a bigger chance of getting them past that home page cos they'll be prepped. Maybe you might have some interesting announcements to make like new products, or improvements to your service, price changes - make sure the world can see this!

I hope you're still following, I'm not saying that you have to follow these 5 commandments but you should use them as guidelines for your homepage akin a home page design charter.

Here's some concrete suggestions and examples for how you might design a home page that follows the guidelines...

1. Put a blog on the home page to make it the focus of your site
2. Put a big video on the 1st fold
3. Have a big picture of your flagship product on sale accompanied by its main selling points
4. Portfolio of Your Work - a concisely written paragraph and a small image for each of your top 4 or 5 projects you've done in the past
5. Announcements and news and links to Photo Galleries - Turn your home page into a live feed of what's happening at your company.

I'm sure there's plenty more that have come to your mind now that I've got you in the mood. The point to take away is that your homepage is the foyer to your online business. You need to keep it clean, simple and inviting because your visitors are going to judge your book by its cover, don't assume otherwise.

Every business owner wants to increase conversions. Whether it's trying to get browsers in your street level clothing store to buy, or website visitors to add a product to their cart, we're all playing a game of converting browsers into buyers.

Naturally there are some browsers in your shop that are really quite serious and almost ready to buy. And there are also various degrees of browsers. I'm going to bunch all the browsing customers and call them Window Shoppers - ranging from completely uncommitted passers by to browsers in your shop tugging at a new sweater.

Recently I was in a store that I had no intention of buying anything from. As I walked through the store casting my eyes around, I started wondering:

How could this store's owner turn ME into a buyer?

Which leads me to a second thought. If I'm in your store I'm 1000 times more valuable than someone in the street, even if I have no intention of buying today. Why? Because you have my attention. It's your shop, your staff and your message. You should have a pretty good chance of converting me. Maybe not today, but one day. Buying decisions are often cumulative things.

But before we get too deep into this, let's try and get inside the head of a window shopper.

The Window Shopping Syndrome

While this would apply to both online and offline stores, I'm going to focus on ecommerce, or online stores. In this context, a window shopper is someone browsing your ecommerce store.

Window shoppers, the lovable little creatures that we are, share some similarities in the way they think. I've identified two things that are true of online window shoppers (By Brett's hand-waving theory of common sense and reasoning).

1. They're actually looking for a product they want that you have, but they're not ready to buy yet. This is sometimes called pre-shopping - finding out information and prices etc before the purchase.
2. They're interested in some information that you have, or just like to look at the latest widget thingy-ma-bob. They're a fan. In any case, they're not buying anything in particular, but you probably sell products or have information that they're generally interested in.

Thankfully when your shop is online your visitors are usually fairly targeted already. You're not so likely to get people wandering onto your website who are just waiting for their tardy friend.

So if that's what they're, how can we keep them happy? How can we convert these browsers into buyers - even though they're not really thinking of buying?

I think there's two things to accept up front:

• They probably won't buy today.
• They might buy in the future, but you can't be sure.

With that in mind, we've got to come up with ways so that they remember us when they DO want to buy.

3 Tactics to Increase Conversions: Recruit the Window Shoppers

Use Email Newsletters to Snag Future Customers

Have you got an email newsletter? Throughout your site, think about how you can prominently display your newsletter. Explicitly ask your website users to subscribe to your newsletter.

Use wording to incentivize the sign up - remember, you have to answer their inevitable question "why should I sign up? Phrases like "Sign up to receive updates on our products" are okay, but not as good as "sign up and receive discounts inside our monthly newsletter". Make sure you follow up on these promises though!

Give the Fans Even More Great Content

Search engines love content; so do fans. If you have reviews and comments on the latest iPod, it will be of interest to iPod fans. Write honest reviews of your products. Take photos and post them. Make videos showing you using the product or service if possible, and put them on YouTube. These things make your site a hub of information for people, and make you their top-of-mind store to buy their favorite widget from.

Build a Community

People like to hang out. They like to discuss and post their thoughts. Give your visitors a reason to stay! You can use Forums - why not link your forums to your products, so that people can discuss particular products? Or you could simply enable comments on your online store so that people can tell others what they think.

The 4Cs

Most of these ideas are easily derived out of the 4Cs framework - it's all about Content, Credibility, Conversion and Customer. Remember to keep what your customers are looking for right at the top of your list of priorities, and you'll be heading in the right direction.

GoodBarry proudly sponsors one of the biggest, and possibly the most star-studded web design conference of the year, An Event Apart. Doesn't matter if you're a web designer, front-end developer or a coder, if you care about web design, web standards, best practices and innovative ideas, this is THE event to attend.

Say hi to Barry and friends at the events listed below:

1. New Orleans – April 24 & 25
2. Boston – June 23 & 24
3. San Francisco – August 18 & 19
4. Chicago – October 13 & 14

PS. don't forget to pick up your GoodBarry Box of Tricks in the foyer.

GoodBarry is proud to announce that we will be sponsoring and attending the Future of Web Design conference in London this Thursday and Friday (17-18 April)! 

It's an excellent opportunity for the audience to get some insight into what this group of web-design experts think the latest trends in usability, interface design and business development are within our industry.

As sponsors, we'll have our GoodBarry stand in the foyer. Feel free to come and visit us. There'll be friendly GoodBarryites saying "Hi!" and giving away a useful "Box of Tricks" (Freebies!) which even contains a glossy storybook.

See you at FOWD on Friday!