If you were to ask a web developer or e-business manager what they’d like to improve about the sites they look after, they’d probably have lots of great ideas. But they’d generally be great big ideas.
Very few would want to test stuff like the lower level navigation text, or the call-to-action copy that appears in the sidebars, or the impact of adding “key features” text separated out of the body copy in the products section.
It just doesn’t sound all that sexy. And it’s not. But if what you’re looking for is bang for your website upgrade buck – and measurable results to boot – optimising microcontent* is something worth doing.
Four bullets. 100% more subscriptions.
Here’s a good example of a small content change that made a big impact on a site’s performance.
UsabilityOne, a web usability analysis firm here in Australia, recently reported on a test they performed on microcontent related to one of their site’s key objectives: to drive email newsletter subscriptions.
Using Google Website Optimizer, they simultaneously tested a new “bulleted” subscription offer versus their original text copy.
Version 1, the original:
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Version 2, with bullets:
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Everything else was unchanged.
The result? The bullet point version yielded twice as many new subscriptions as the original text. Read the full case study.
It’s all about driving users to attraction/distraction.
Like shoppers in the crowded aisles of a $2 shop, web users are looking for the good stuff, but they’re not going to try that hard to hard to find it.
So it’s worth taking the time to think small. You may find the small block of copy under the 3D Flash animation is where the action really is.
Note: microcontent has also come to mean small information chunks on a web page that can stand alone or be republished on other sites (such as an RSS weather forecast). I'm using the term in its original meaning: small block of words that can be scanned by a site user. See the Wikipedia microcontent article for more info.