I had to change a battery yesterday for my son’s Sebring. He’s off to college, and decided not to take it with him so it sat around for a few weeks while we figured out what we want to do with it.
Tuesday I tried to start it and, as you guessed, deader than a door nail. Spent all day charging it, and it worked fine for a while, but yesterday, once again, dead.
Now when I went to take it out and bring it down to Sears for a new one, I’m struck with the stupidity of design that drives me crazy. As an engineer by trade, I might be a bit more critical than most, but this was stupid.
The way the battery is mounted in the car, there is a goofy contraption strapping it in that you need to take both bolts off… stupidity number 1.
But the real kicker was the bolts clamping on the battery posts were different sizes, and this just pisses me off. But it’s worse than that. One was an english unit nut and the other was metric.
What?
Yep, they mixed different size nuts with different units attached to the same battery.
Stupid!
This made me think of a common mistake a lot of people make while marketing on places like google and yahoo. You see that simple design hack job, causing me to first change the wrench, and also changing units on the wrench (lucky for me I had metric), disrupted my calm, and my attention.
The process was not congruent.
The same thing happens when you develop an ad on google, send them to a landing page that has a completely different tone, feel, wording than the ad, and even more common when the visitor moves past the landing page.
Your marketing should have the same look, feel, tone, and verbiage from the initial exposure (google, yahoo, where ever) through to the landing page, and on to the thank you page, and even in your email follow up messages.
One simple thing you can do to help that process is include a picture of you on your landing page, thank you page, and all the follow up messages you send. Other people include a video on the landing and thankyou pages, and a photo in emails. That simple step adds a thread in your funnel.
This is called “Congruency”, and it is extremely important in today’s market as any little bump along the sales funnel (like a different nut size on the battery) and you’ll lose the visitor to another search.
Realize it doesn’t stop with a photo, either. Do you have your Google ad text on your landing page near the top so the visitor sees the connection? Does it make sense to have it on your page? If not, then you might want to consider changing either your ad or your landing page so they are congruent.
Try it out, and see if your conversion rates don’t improve!
Dave
