What you say, and what they hear

Whenever I am writing emails or talking to people, I try my best to make sure that what I write or say is easy to understand. A message that is misinterpreted will most often cost you extra time and effort to solve gracefully. Practising this mindset continuously will of course improve your own communication skills over time, but it will most definately also make you realize whenever someone else fails to deliver a precise message – one that can not be misunderstood.

In general 2 things exist in communication “what you say” (and your own understanding and context of that), and “what the recipient hear” – which can be something completely different. Gary Larson, one of my favorite sketch/comic artists, already immortalized this basic rule of life [image link] (copyright restrictions might apply for the image). This also covers the problem that even despite your best efforts to deliver a clear message, maybe the recipient will still misinterpret the content.

 

Today i saw a real life example of something which probably made sense to the communicator, but which is easily misunderstood by the recipient. Basically this is a big example of what can go wrong in communication. I don’t think i need to explain further…

 

 

Normally things do not go as awry as in the advertisement above, but it serves as a reminder to carefully consider what you say or write before you execute.

 

So why am I reminding you all about this? Well basically because in online marketing, you have many options to deliver messages (also ‘bad’ messages), one is to do A/B testing (aka ‘split testing’ or ‘multivariate testing’) where several versions of a message can be defined and displayed to different visitors in order to track which option returns most conversions.

This is one of the basic features in Sitecore’s Online Marketing Suite (OMS) by the way. Imagine that you are releasing a new product and you put a big message on your front page. Normally this will get attention directly, but if you re-phrased it a bit, maybe it would get even more hits. To test this, simply create a few versions and deliver them randomly to all visitors. Over time, one option will prove better than the others, and then you should obviously select this as the only option (and stop the A/B test). This concept is covered in a 2-3 minute video that was recently released on the Sitecore website. The video titled “Increasing your website conversions” is available on this page: http://www.sitecore.net/Products/Resources/Tours.aspx

We are also currently inviting people to attend a webinar about OMS, which will also cover how Sitecore deals with A/B testing. To read more and sign up, please see: http://www.sitecore.net/en/News/Webinars/2009/OMS-Webinar-December-09-Europe.aspx.