Conversion rates are a dead giveaway. If your e-commerce website isn’t turning browsers into buyers, figure out what’s wrong. Usually it’s the copy and/or the appropriateness of the website for the product or service you’re selling!
It has happened again. A new client is writhing in agony because she tapped her brother to create a website for her. He created an atrocious, generic-looking, dated, non-responsive, inappropriately-designed website and stuck her do-it-yourself copy into it about a year ago. The copy she wrote was so substandard and haphazard that it hasn’t earned her any conversions… not a single one in all the time the site has been live!
So she paid me to write her 100% new, engaging, compelling home page copy and to edit/enhance the other pages so the site would convert browsers into buyers. I did that for $360. It should have cost her more, but I believe in her product, know and like her, and wanted to help her…so I worked within her stated budget (which was $500). Her budget gave me 6.5 hours to devote to the task; it only took 4.5 hours, so I returned $140 to her.
She was thrilled. She paid me and passed it along to her brother, who pitched a bitch and said he’d have to rework everything to get the new copy to fit. So he just popped in the new home page copy, willy nilly. The paragraphs on it run into each other (they weren’t written like that); a small part of the home copy remains the same as it was before I fixed it! The result: a hodgepodge of schizophrenic-looking copy, stationed on a website that is completely wrong, presentation-wise, for the product she’s offering–leading visitors to her site to think “WTF?!!!” instead of “OMG! What a find! This product will save me from the awful pain I’ve been enduring–GUARANTEED or I GET MY MONEY BACK!”
Her brother has shot her in the foot, gotten his back up, and walked away…quit…leaving her frustrated, furious and flat-footed…
She’s fit to be tied. I’m fit to be tied because she has a wonderful product and I wanted to help her promote it by pointing all of the people I know to her website as soon as it was presentable. I used the product myself and have received great benefit from it. I even wrote a testimonial for it; I’m willing to endorse it globally!
But the chances of her selling any from her website the ways things stand now remain slim to nil, only slightly higher than they were before because the copy wasn’t completely swapped out and the website presentation is so poor. And no way will I point the thousands of people I’m connected to via Facebook and LinkedIn to the site until it’s fixed because I’m afraid I’d just be shooting her in the foot. It isn’t worth the risk. Until that website is 100% ready to introduce to the world, I’ll remain as tight-lipped about it as an Aldebaran Shellmouth. (Thanks for this idiom, Star Trek writer Joseph Pevney!). (Ref: Amok Time, Star Trek TOS)
All of this could have been so easily avoided, of course, if the client hadn’t decided to rely on a prickly family member and if she hadn’t elected to write the copy herself to start with. How far behind has doing so put her? As far behind as the length of time that the website has been online–and the hemorrhaging of visitors continues! Very few people are going to return to a website that has frustrated or put them off the first time they visited it, so the best thing for her to do now would be to take it down altogether for the time being and get someone else involved who knows how to create responsive websites. My power partner Lisa Twining Taylor (Dancing Goat Web Design) does. She has created all three of my websites and I’m totally happy with them.
So now my client has great copy,only some of which is presently view-able on an otherwise sub-standard website. I feel like strangling her brother, someone I don’t even know and hope I never meet–because I’d have a hard time submerging the attitude I have toward him right now. He might get throttled! What he did “for” (to!) her is criminal.
It isn’t fair. She and her product deserve better…
