Flip the coin to tell the story

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Feb 1, 2012 in Advertising, Marketing, Story | 2 comments

It’s now the first day of February, so we’re a month into my three words of story, restoration, and compassion. All three are moving ahead very intensely, and I want to share one of the lessons I’ve learned about story.

Early on, I thought stories were just narratives. You tell what happened. This tends to lead to run-on expositions that don’t offer anything interesting. When I first chose my three words for 2012, I asked some great storytellers like Ron Ploof for advice about how to construct better stories.

One of the immediate takeaways that I got from Ron’s advice as well as others is the idea of flipping the coin. When you flip a coin, you see obvious and immediate change, change that is very difficult to ignore. The state of the coin has flipped, and you see the opposite side of what you were just looking at.

Flipping the coin automatically creates a state change, which is a key ingredient to telling a better story. At each section of the story you tell, you need to change the state of the story to keep it compelling. For example, in my recent travelogue’s first draft, there were about 8 more entries in the post, all basically saying, “STILL WAITING OMG” or some variant of that. Any of my friends who were on Twitter or IM with me that afternoon got the raw, unedited versions of those.

The thing about those lines is that they didn’t accomplish a state change besides me getting grumpier. As a result, they didn’t advance the story forward. The coin was laying there on the table, unflipped. I pruned those entries out as a result, and the end version of the story was much tighter.

Take a look at your sales and marketing copy. Take a look at your stories. If you’re not changing states as you tell the story, then your story will not be compelling at all, and you’ll lose people very quickly. If you think about it, this is consistent with every bad sales pitch you’ve had to endure. The worst sales pitches are not only when the salesman fails to take a breath, they’re also a long litany of unchanging details: this product will make you slimmer, wealthier, more attractive to the gender of your choice, etc. It introduces no conflict.

Compare this to an outstanding salesman who tells a compelling story that interweaves loss and gain, profit and debt, neglect and attraction, ugly and sexy, and you immediately understand how important that coin flip is.

Go back to your content and check it for coin flips. If the coin never turns over, you’ve got some rewriting to do.

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The most powerful customer service secret of all

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jan 31, 2012 in Customer Service | 2 comments

The simplest and most powerful customer service secret of all: tell your customers what’s going on.

Or better yet, give them the ability to tell themselves.

Refer back to my joyful travelogue recently. The #1 thing the airline could have done to make everyone’s wait easier would have been to provide more timely information.

If I could have checked a visual status board, I could have at my convenience and known whenever I wanted what was happening with my flight. The Type A personalities who were shouting at the gate agents on the rare occasions that they were available could have instead compulsively checked the board every 15 seconds.

If I never have to guess what’s going on, my imagination never has to cook up imagined slights against me. I never have to believe that your employees are lazy or uncaring.

If you’ve got a server down or a datacenter experiencing problems, show a status dashboard. Heck, put up a webcam so that customers can see employees working (assuming you have good looking, hard working employees, of course). If you’ve got shipping delays, let people see that information and make it as clear as possible what’s happening. Google, for example, does this brilliantly:

Don’t believe there’s a demand for that information? Go check the iOS or Android app stores for status apps.

I paid for this flight tracking app.

You’ll find people paying good money for third party apps to keep an eye on you. Better that you provide the service, don’t you think?

Tell people what’s going on, provide them with the best available information, and you’ll earn much more customer loyalty and retention.

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How to track return customers using Google Analytics

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jan 30, 2012 in Advertising, Marketing, Metrics | 1 comment

One of the most valuable people to visit your website is your existing customer. This is the person who’s already bought into you, the person who has already decided you’re worth doing business with. This person is leagues more valuable than the random pay per click visitor. Do you know what your returning customers want from your website efforts?

Here’s one way to make that determination. If you’re using Google Analytics and you have a place on your website where only returning customers go, this will help you identify and track them.

First, you’ll need to modify your Google Analytics code on that customer-only page. This can be a thank you page after someone has filled out a form or purchased something from you. It can also be the screen immediately after a login to a web service, or even a special customer-only landing page that you direct email subscribers to.

Create a custom variable on that page in Google Analytics. Here’s the format:

_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',
1, // This custom var is set to slot #1. Required. You can have up to 5.
'Member Type', // The name of the custom variable. Required.
'Paying Customer', // The value of the custom variable. Required.
1 // Sets the scope to visitor-level. Required for tracking customers.
]);

Place this within your Google Analytics tracking code for that page only. You only need it on the page or pages that returning customers visit the most.

Next, you’ll want to see what your returning customers are actually doing. Create a custom traffic segment in Google Analytics and identify it by the customer variable name and value. For the example code above, it might look like this:

Congratulations, you now have a way to identify returning customers! Browse through Google Analytics data with this traffic segment on to see only those returning customers and what they did on your site, where they went, what was most popular, where they came from, and arguably most important of all: did they convert again?

If there are certain pages which returning customers visit far more than others, you may even want to think about rewriting them or focusing on them. For example, if returning customers are constantly revisiting a tech support page about a certain product, you might have an early indicator that something is wrong with the product.

Obviously, you can tailor these custom variables to anything you like. If you host a website with a variety of subscription levels, you could track to see whether Gold members visit different pages than, say, Silver members. The sky’s the limit with custom variables and your returning customers.

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