As per my post a while ago regarding the Commonwealth Bank of Australia's 2013 vision, they have released an update this week regarding their first iphone application which builds on the much buzzed 'augmented reality' technology being developed on many smartphones now.
Users spend only 20% of their attention looking below the fold
From Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, March 22, 2010
His findings show they do scroll, but their attention levels rapidly decrease, reinforcing the F-shaped scanning model which i have discussed previously in how users read online.
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Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.In Jakob's latest alertbox column, his research revives the age old debate about whether users scroll below the fold.
His findings show they do scroll, but their attention levels rapidly decrease, reinforcing the F-shaped scanning model which i have discussed previously in how users read online.
Image sourced from www.useit.com
Online web forms to generate leads? good or bad?
I rarely complete web forms to download a whitepaper or similar, as I know from past experience I will get telephone calls and emails harassing me to buy a product or solution.
For corporate and investment banks, most of our websites are very much glorified brochure ware sites, that look to provide information with a generic call to action generally around an offline telephone call, or option to email a business development representative.
With that in mind, how can we use the valuable content we provide online to provide avenues to establish new business relationships, without annoying visitors to which they don’t return.
Economic research and whitepapers
From my own research, it is clear that economic research is a key segment of content that banks provide at this level to prospects.
However, a significant number of corporate banks have begun to place this content behind ‘subscription’ brick walls, requiring you to tell them your life story and the names of your 3 children to even see what kind of information is available. Then no doubt you will have one of their business development team ringing you even before you have downloaded and printed off your first report!
So what’s more important? Capturing a cold lead before they have even made up their mind about you... or giving them the option to fill out their details, if they choose to let them fill it in when they feel more comfortable about your organisation?
It’s all about getting your report to the audience, and placing targeted call to actions discreetly, on the visitor’s agenda and when they are ready to talk.
The first instance sets an unequalled value balance relationship, forcing the visitor to give up quite private information (which online we always are more protective of) without giving much in return. Is this how things are going to be? I wouldn’t stick around for this if I was the customer.
Getting our position out globally
It’s also important to consider, that this kind of information although may be written for ‘customers’ and prospects, there are many other user types exist which we want to get these key facts out to.
Journalists are the most significant audience group that spring to mind, and the business TV programmes are always featuring economists and analysts from the major banks as well as private equity and hedge funds.
When these people appear on mainstream media, traffic for that hour sees a significant uplift from the ‘curious’ visitor, with on average 90% of these being new visitors.
What is an interesting statistic to watch is how many of these turn into return visitors and ultimately enter the sales channel (you need some significant resource available to get this kind of analysis!)
So what is the best approach?
So you can see from this, I personally believe dropping all your insights and whitepapers behind a sign up form can have a detrimental effect in relation to building the initial trust with your visitors online.
In theory, the content you are looking to protect should be so valuable to the reader that after reading it, the call to action or its contents should itself inspire and motivate them to get in touch with you.
Tweet
For corporate and investment banks, most of our websites are very much glorified brochure ware sites, that look to provide information with a generic call to action generally around an offline telephone call, or option to email a business development representative.
With that in mind, how can we use the valuable content we provide online to provide avenues to establish new business relationships, without annoying visitors to which they don’t return.
Economic research and whitepapers
From my own research, it is clear that economic research is a key segment of content that banks provide at this level to prospects.
However, a significant number of corporate banks have begun to place this content behind ‘subscription’ brick walls, requiring you to tell them your life story and the names of your 3 children to even see what kind of information is available. Then no doubt you will have one of their business development team ringing you even before you have downloaded and printed off your first report!
So what’s more important? Capturing a cold lead before they have even made up their mind about you... or giving them the option to fill out their details, if they choose to let them fill it in when they feel more comfortable about your organisation?
It’s all about getting your report to the audience, and placing targeted call to actions discreetly, on the visitor’s agenda and when they are ready to talk.
The first instance sets an unequalled value balance relationship, forcing the visitor to give up quite private information (which online we always are more protective of) without giving much in return. Is this how things are going to be? I wouldn’t stick around for this if I was the customer.
Getting our position out globally
It’s also important to consider, that this kind of information although may be written for ‘customers’ and prospects, there are many other user types exist which we want to get these key facts out to.
Journalists are the most significant audience group that spring to mind, and the business TV programmes are always featuring economists and analysts from the major banks as well as private equity and hedge funds.
When these people appear on mainstream media, traffic for that hour sees a significant uplift from the ‘curious’ visitor, with on average 90% of these being new visitors.
What is an interesting statistic to watch is how many of these turn into return visitors and ultimately enter the sales channel (you need some significant resource available to get this kind of analysis!)
So what is the best approach?
So you can see from this, I personally believe dropping all your insights and whitepapers behind a sign up form can have a detrimental effect in relation to building the initial trust with your visitors online.
In theory, the content you are looking to protect should be so valuable to the reader that after reading it, the call to action or its contents should itself inspire and motivate them to get in touch with you.
Weekly Tips: writing great links
Over the next month I am writing a series of tips to help improve your website content. The first, is writing great links.
Tip 1: Don’t click here
Users scan pages; don’t make them read the surrounding text to understand what the ‘click here’ will do.
So often I hear others working in marketing (even with the ‘online’ in their title) using the ‘click here’ phrase when talking about a call to action in a web page or email campaign.
We know how users read on the web, they scan.
Look at the below piece of text:
As good practice, if your linking text matches the title or heading 1 of the page your linking to, and build this into the sentence, it will really help visitors understand more quickly, and you will see greater click-through rates.
Our example reworked could be:
- Read more, more and more information
- Download report, download now
- > and >>
Often when taking copy from print to online, its best to look at reworking it to best optimise the opportunity to get visitors clicking through.
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Tip 1: Don’t click here
Users scan pages; don’t make them read the surrounding text to understand what the ‘click here’ will do.
So often I hear others working in marketing (even with the ‘online’ in their title) using the ‘click here’ phrase when talking about a call to action in a web page or email campaign.
We know how users read on the web, they scan.
Look at the below piece of text:
With Corporate Banking Centres across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, you will find that our local Relationship Directors can work with you closely bringing ideas and enthusiasm to meet your aspirations for business growth. Click here to read more. Their considerable expertise and experience shines through in the value and commitment they can offer to your business. Click here to read more.If you scan it briefly, you will quickly see that to understand what the 'click here' does, you have to read the preceeding sentence. Even worse, you aren't even sure what will come up if you click.
As good practice, if your linking text matches the title or heading 1 of the page your linking to, and build this into the sentence, it will really help visitors understand more quickly, and you will see greater click-through rates.
Our example reworked could be:
With Corporate Banking Centres across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, you will find that our local Relationship Directors can work with you closely bringing ideas and enthusiasm to meet your aspirations for business growth. Their considerable expertise and experience shines through in the value and commitment they can offer to your business.The naughty usage of 'click here', is the most established, but there are some other baddies to watch out for.
- Read more, more and more information
- Download report, download now
- > and >>
Often when taking copy from print to online, its best to look at reworking it to best optimise the opportunity to get visitors clicking through.
Quick insights from JN on key website areas
I was surfing around this evening and found these articles and found them helpful
Investor Relations (IR) on Corporate Websites
About Us Information on Websites
Press Area Usability
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Investor Relations (IR) on Corporate Websites
About Us Information on Websites
Press Area Usability
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Tweet using web writing principles
In work we have really started to investigate the opportunities twitter can provide as a tool for driving additional traffic to our content.
It has got me thinking... has twitter created a new behavioural method of reading online? or is this a opportunity to capitalise on a opportunity to create tweets that stand out from the crowd?
Earlier in 2009 I recall reading a study by Jakob Nielson on how we only read the first 11 characters in a list online. This got me thinking about the tweets from the people follow in our twitter dashboards, how many do I actually read?
It’s true, some tweets just blur into one another, and some real golden insight or opinion could be missed.
We also read these pages in an F shaped pattern, so as times goes on, these will appear further and further down the page, and less likely to be read unless they are written in a way which grabs their attention.
So in a congested world of communication.. how do you make yourself heard?
Tight CTAs
Unlike when writing for web pages, we can’t control what content surrounds our call to action (effectively our tweet among 100's of others), so not only do we have to optimise these to fit within the 140 characters, but they have to stand out from the crowd.
Short URLs
Tinyurl, bit.ly, tr.im etc are driving millions of links each day through to content linked from twitter, but the format with their random number/letter collections doesn’t adhere to the practices of good hyper-linking text. Remember, your followers are scanning your tweets, so ‘http://tr.im/dbuxa’ means very little to them.
Having your URL link relating to your tweet could be the most powerful devices that attracts followers eyes to your tweet (i.e. http://doiop.com/webmanagerinlondon) Have a look at using doiop.com to links with a descriptive keyword following the / for free.
Cant bold? Capitalise
When web writing, if we aren’t hyperlinking, we can use bold to draw the eye to a piece of copy.
We can’t bold in twitter, but we can capitalise without ‘shouting’. My recommendation would be to use this on place names. For instance:
Twitter has allowed for the masses to start producing content for the web, and along with this, standards slip.
I don't feel twitter and similar tools will change the way we read dramatically, if anything it will further enhance our scanning/discarding of content if it doesn't grab us straight away.
More reading
There is heaps of great stuff out there that others have written. Feel free to post a comment with others you have found.
Tweet
It has got me thinking... has twitter created a new behavioural method of reading online? or is this a opportunity to capitalise on a opportunity to create tweets that stand out from the crowd?
It’s true, some tweets just blur into one another, and some real golden insight or opinion could be missed.
We also read these pages in an F shaped pattern, so as times goes on, these will appear further and further down the page, and less likely to be read unless they are written in a way which grabs their attention.
So in a congested world of communication.. how do you make yourself heard?
Tight CTAs
Unlike when writing for web pages, we can’t control what content surrounds our call to action (effectively our tweet among 100's of others), so not only do we have to optimise these to fit within the 140 characters, but they have to stand out from the crowd.
Short URLs
Tinyurl, bit.ly, tr.im etc are driving millions of links each day through to content linked from twitter, but the format with their random number/letter collections doesn’t adhere to the practices of good hyper-linking text. Remember, your followers are scanning your tweets, so ‘http://tr.im/dbuxa’ means very little to them.
Having your URL link relating to your tweet could be the most powerful devices that attracts followers eyes to your tweet (i.e. http://doiop.com/webmanagerinlondon) Have a look at using doiop.com to links with a descriptive keyword following the / for free.
Cant bold? Capitalise
When web writing, if we aren’t hyperlinking, we can use bold to draw the eye to a piece of copy.
We can’t bold in twitter, but we can capitalise without ‘shouting’. My recommendation would be to use this on place names. For instance:
MANCHESTER (April 28) Visit our stand 21B at ACT 2010 Conference to meet an Olympian. More at http://ltsbcm.com/LloydsACT10In conclusion
Twitter has allowed for the masses to start producing content for the web, and along with this, standards slip.
I don't feel twitter and similar tools will change the way we read dramatically, if anything it will further enhance our scanning/discarding of content if it doesn't grab us straight away.
More reading
There is heaps of great stuff out there that others have written. Feel free to post a comment with others you have found.
- Twitter Postings: Iterative Design (Jakob Nielson)
- Doiop.com
- Copywriting for Twitter
Keynote Customer Experience Rankings tests UK banking websites
From Banking Times
Keynote customer experience has released their latest results on customer experience rankings for UK banks. It was a reasonable sample, 2500 participants.
Here are the results...
Overall customer experience – will visitors move to online banking?
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Keynote customer experience has released their latest results on customer experience rankings for UK banks. It was a reasonable sample, 2500 participants.
Here are the results...
Overall customer experience – will visitors move to online banking?
- 1. The Co-operative Bank
- 2. Nationwide
- 3. Halifax
- 1. NatWest
- 2. The Co-operative Bank
- 3. Halifax
- 1. The Co-operative Bank
- 2. Nationwide
- 3. Halifax
- 1. The Co-operative Bank
- 2. Nationwide
- 3. HSBC
- 1. NatWest
- 2. Halifax
- 3. Nationwide
- 1. Halifax
- 2. Bank of Scotland
- 3. HSBC
New Barclays repaint
A colleague at work mentioned this to me today.
The Barclays Corporate site has been 'repainted', but still seem to be much of the same content as before. Previously was Barclays commerical but a internal rejig seems to align with with Lloyds and RBS.
It is minor, but for weeks the image on their 'Supporting UK Business' page has been broken (seem to ref the internal cms system). Also they seem to have removed their links to their turning the corner site?
Take a look
http://www.barclayscorporate.com/
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The Barclays Corporate site has been 'repainted', but still seem to be much of the same content as before. Previously was Barclays commerical but a internal rejig seems to align with with Lloyds and RBS.
It is minor, but for weeks the image on their 'Supporting UK Business' page has been broken (seem to ref the internal cms system). Also they seem to have removed their links to their turning the corner site?
Take a look
http://www.barclayscorporate.com/
Commonweath Bank 2013 vision
An interesting perspective from the Commonwealth Bank in Australia of their vision for 2013.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTv2tMenhxA
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTv2tMenhxA
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