Do you ever get the idea that the marketing department in certain companies has no connection whatsoever with the development, sales, and customer service organizations. Airlines and phone companies spring quickly to mind as examples. They’re heavy advertisers (not so much anymore for the airlines) who work to build all kinds of images and associations that go immediately out the window the second you’re forced to talk to someone who actually works at the company.

That marketing (and selling) can only work if there is a connection (if not actual symmetry) between that which is promised and that which is delivered should be obvious. But it must not be or else why would so many companies do so many things to disappoint, and even enrage us, every day? The management of these companies is often accused of having their heads stuck somewhere, but it turns out it wasn’t the place we were all thinking.

According to the Eisenbergs, these people have their heads inside a bottle, and the thick colored glass from that bottle is warping their perspective beyond recognition. It’s a great metaphor and captures both the reasonable issues – that all kinds of competing issues and pressures impact decisions, and the unreasonable results – the penny saving decisions that infuriate mega-dollar customers.

We’re challenged to take the customers’ perspective when making decisions. They’re not thinking about your budget limits or staff shortages, they don’t know (or care) who screwed up the design or manufacturing. It’s an interesting simple test for corporate decision making: what would the customer do? (Bumper stickers anyone?)

Applied to website, forgetting to ask WWTCD (or WDTCW – what does the customer want) leads to low conversion rates. Low conversion rates lead, in most online marketing organizations, lead to a desire to drive more traffic. Huh?

Like the proverbial man who loses his keys in a dark closet but chooses to look for them in the living room because ‘the light is better’, almost all online businesses attempt to improve sales by getting more people to the site and not by converting a higher percentage of the people who are already coming. The reason is that it seems easier. There are known ways to drive more traffic: Optimize your pages! Buy more keywords! Create more partnerships! Until now, there wasn’t a known and reliable process to improve conversion rates, so most sites skipped it.

The math is relatively easy, as the book points out. Doubling revenue requires either doubling inbound traffic (at the same quality rate) which is difficult and expensive in almost every case, or improving conversion rates by a modest amount. Improving conversion rates has a cost, but it’s hard to imagine a case where it’s even a small fraction of the cost of doubling traffic – and of course the benefits of better conversion rates apply instantly to all the traffic you already have, so the payback should be very quick and the dividends will keep on coming for a very long time.

Given that it is the essential conversion point for this book, it would be easy to argue that the point here is dramatically understated. To me this is the jump-up-and-down-insight. IT MAKES NO SENSE TO SPEND 95% OF YOUR TIME AND 95% OF YOUR BUDGET DRIVING MORE AND MORE PEOPLE INTO A PROCESS WHICH (at best) IS 5% EFFICIENT. Of course, most online marketers don’t do this – they spend 100% of their time and budget driving more and more people to sites which are less than 2% efficient.

As a whole, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark explains a lot about how this became the norm, defines a process and method that can alleviate it, and highlights the many indirect benefits in terms of better customer experience. It’s an overwhelming presentation that will make those already inclined, and some of those with an open mind, completely change the way they look at the role and development process for web sites.

But in my experience the core economic benefit – that Persuasion Architecture is a method of dramatically increasing profits – is for some reason the hardest to convey (despite powerful and plentiful evidence), and often doesn’t seem to be the driving or even primary deciding factor in adoption. It sometimes seems like convincing people to give up smoking, when you have to point out, that in addition to avoiding death, you can also save some money and keep the brown spots off your fingers and teeth.

After making their economic case, the book points out that values which are ‘fuzzy but real’ are less valued than ‘cold hard facts’ and that is part of the problem. The benefits of PA can be measured on the whole over a long period of time, but even then it’s difficult to pinpoint which element and why the change occurred, and the environment is full of other influences that it could be argued, make precise credit hard to claim.

Perhaps that’s why the first half of the book comes at the idea of consumer experience from so many angles. If we can accept that our communications will be more effective if developed and delivered from an ‘empathy-based’ perspective (ie give the people what they want) then change can be motivated just on the basis of wanting to be heard.

Using ‘cold hard facts’ we’ve always found that bounce rates (the number of people who leave your web site after seeing just 1 page) and what I call failure rates (the people who leave after 3 or less pages) are always the most compelling. To definitively see that people are coming to your site and almost immediately leaving makes the stark point that something is very wrong with your site. Changing the site to address the needs the visitor brings entices them to stay. Marketers inherently want people to stay, to hear their stories and read their copy. I’m not sure I ever realized it before but I think they want that more than they want the revenue. In any case, this is where we’re leading – towards a process that ‘models interactivity through empathy’ and keeps people at our sites longer.

And oh ya. In marketing terms, you get to live a lot longer and die a lot less frequently.

em>:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.