Sometimes I have to wonder what we're trying to achieve as businesses with all the hoops we make our customers jump through. I was reading about an idea that's not really new but seems to be making the rounds again about how little social sites like it when posts include links because of course, the social sites want to keep you scrolling rather than clicking away, so of course they're encouraging people to use fewer links by having the algorithms favor posts without links. If you've been in the marketing world a while you're like, "no, that's not new at all," and you would be right, because it's something we've talked about since 'clickbait' became a term and even before that, and we business people had to come to terms with the fact that not every customer can be brought in by flashy lights and tricked into becoming a customer or subscriber.
So the question for today: why can't we (why don't we) make things simpler for the customer or potential customer? Of course some businesses do make things as simple as possible for their customers, but time and again some things stick out that make me wonder what we're trying to accomplish as a business.
For example: why don't we include tags/categories on our blog posts (do we expect people to search back through hundreds of posts or just know what topics we write about?)? Why do we send a sentence or two of context and a link back to a blog post or article rather than sending the whole article/blog post? Why do we communicate our product in ounces when everyone else uses pounds (because we all love doing extra math?)? Why do we make our sales pitches and descriptions so short (is it possible to run out of text space?) or include only one picture (there's only one good side?)? Why do we combine our login and signup page on our website? Do we really gain enough readers/subscribers when we gate our content to make it worth gating? Do we have to make them search through 10 pages of products or can we include better sorting and elimination options to help them get to what they're looking for (one of the biggest stores in the world is guilty of this)? Do we really need all that information from a subscriber up front, or can we start with the basics and invite them to share more with us as part of our welcome sequence or at some other time in the future when we've got a relationship established? Why don't we post our hours on our storefronts and our websites and our social accounts (because they won't make the effort to stop in when we're open?)? Why don't we have some night hours in addition to some weekend hours (because, doesn't everyone operate between the hours of 8a and 6p Monday-Friday)? Why don't we include options for subscribers to update their information in our email newsletter footers (because unsubscribes are so much better?)?
I'm sure I could keep going, and you probably have lots of things that you could come up with that just seem so overly complicated in some of the businesses you do business with, but I think I've established my point. When we make it easier for customers to interact with us, learn from us, do business with us, share about us, and buy from us, not only are they more likely to do business with us, we make them more confident in their commitment to us as a business they like to do business with. Yes, I'm sure you've got at least some reasons for why you do things the way you do (good reasons of course, not: "I haven't had time to update it" or "that's too much work"), but are those reasons keeping you from customers who would do business with you or share about you with others who would do business with you? Take a moment this week to see if you can make your customers a little happier by simplifying one or two things. It might end up making things simpler and better for you too!
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