THE CHOICE BETWEEN YES AND YES
Human beings -- customers included -- like to have options. If you only offer your customer one type of product or service, you've also given her an option you likely didn't intended to... which is to not buy at all. Instead of presenting her with that yes/no decision, find ways to offer variations to your products. In other words, give her a choice between saying yes, and saying yes.

A product on Sean D'Souza's www.psychotactics.com marketing website, the "Brain Audit" eBook, is available by itself for $140. Says D'Souza, the same eBook comes in a bonus pack, which contains an extra MP3 file and transcript, for $215. One day, D'Souza decided to eliminate one choice and funnel all purchases into the remaining Brain Audit package -- the choice most of his customers made anyway. Upon doing this, his sales immediately started to downslide.

So what had happened? It boiled down to choice. When both products were offered, customers could choose to add the bonus MP3 or not. When D'Souza pulled one of the offers, customers still had a choice -- only this time, it was either to buy the remaining product or not to buy at all. There was always a choice; it was just that the options had changed. Where there had been the options of eBook (yes) or eBook and MP3 (yes), there was now the option of eBook and MP3 (yes), or nothing at all -- the dreaded option of "no."

Interestingly, it wasn't that the new offer was turning away the more frugal customers. When both the $140 and $215 packages were offered, 97.5 percent of all customers chose the $215 version. In other words, they usually bought what the seller wanted them to buy anyway -- but preferred to make that choice for themselves.

So what did D'Souza do? He returned both offers to the website, and sales rebounded. Customers will always choose, D'Souza says. The lesson is to control their options. Ferret out the "no" option wherever you can. Change it to another version of "yes," and you might snag some people who, in the past, have not been buying.

Source: www.psychotactics.com

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TOP 10 WEB DESIGN MISTAKES
Website usability expert Jakob Nielsen has compiled a list of the ten biggest mistakes you can make when building a website -- mistakes which confuse and irritate your visitors. Read the full explanations in the "Source" link below, but here are the highlights:

1. Improper use of a "Search" function on the site
2. Using PDFs for items that are intended to be read online
3. Not allowing visited links to turn a different color than links users have not yet visited
4. Non-scannable text (like a page completely filled with long, uninterrupted paragraphs)
5. Not allowing users to change the size of text
6. Page titles which do not register well with search engines
7. Anything that looks like an advertisement
8. Violating established website design conventions (like odd placement of navigation bars, or unconventional names of website sections)
9. Pages which open in a new browser window
10. Not providing answers to questions that users are likely to have (like not putting the price of an item online)

Source: www.useit.com

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CORE VALUES GUIDE YOUR BRAND
Values come first, brand comes second. The order of those two elements is vitally important. Values set the stage for what your company IS, what traits it embodies, and what it stands for. All other aspects of brand -- the face your company shows to the world -- flow from these intimate statements of what it is on the inside.

Michael Moser, author of "United We Brand," suggests developing core values at the very outset of developing a brand strategy. Consider the brand "The United States of America," says Moser. The Founding Fathers wrote that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." This clear statement of America's values -- what it stood for, and why anyone was bothering to create it in the first place -- provided the direction of the rest of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

What if the Founding Fathers had chosen to forsake the creation of values and had worked on the symbol of the new country (the flag) first? This is how many companies begin their branding processes -- with the creation of a logo. What if they had hired a hotshot named Betsy Ross to make a flag, and then had carried their snazzy new symbol around to rally support for the war? The flag in and of itself did not motivate early Americans to fight and die. Settlers fought for their independence -- for the pursuit of those inalienable Rights. They fought for the values behind the flag rather than for the flag itself.

Values provide a stable platform from which to launch the rest of your brand, including marketing themes and messages. Values guide decisions. A company can always go back to its core values and say, "THIS is who we are. So THIS is what we should do."

Look for more information on core values and their impact on brand, coming soon in a Hoeck Associates special report.

Source: Michael Moser, "United We Brand"