It’s Saturday and I’m just sitting down to do a total re-write of the VisiOlo sales page and sales offer because the current one just is not doing it’s job.

Through testing, I know that the majority of visitors who see the page are not getting to the part of the sales letter that actually talks about features and benefits — they are not scrolling past the very top of the sales letter. I know this because I’m testing a future feature of VisiOlo that very simply measures how deep visitors go into my sales page.

This new testing feature still needs some work before it delivers rock solid measurements, so I’m not going to give you hard numbers, but I have seen enough data to reinforce my intuitive feel that the message and structure of the copy is just not right.

I’m not really that surprised. In fact, in my experience, it takes several months of active selling and focused effort to ‘tune’ a sales message and offer. 

First, you have ‘gross tuning’ in which you decide what the key messages are and how to structure the delivery of those messages.  Sometimes, gross tuning is completed before you start selling the product. But, more often than not, it has to take place in the real world in real sales conditions.  This principle, by the way, is as true for products that are sold face-to-face with a sales force as it is for info products sold online.

Then, you have ‘fine tuning’ which is more about testing headlines, layout, color combinations, small changes in price, etc. This tends to be an ongoing process where improvements are small, but over time, result in steadily increasing conversions.

The VisiOlo sales message is definitely in the gross tuning phase, which means there are people visiting the sales page for whom VisiOlo could be a transformational tool, but they are not even aware of it because what they need to know is buried too deep in the sales letter, or not there at all.  This is not good for me, nor is it good for for my potential customers, so I’m starting over with a blank piece of paper.

I’ve learned several things over the last thirty days that will influence the next version of the sales message, but one thing is for sure. The current introductiory price of $9.99 has got to go.

So, if you are considering a VisiOlo membership, now is the time, before I update the offer and increase the price.

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“The Mirror Neuron was discovered in Parma Italy in 1989. It was originally called the “monkey see, monkey do” neuron. It is basically the reason why sometimes we can feel what other people feel — discomfort for instance. Let me ask you to do something, John, and your listeners as well. Just close your eyes and imagine that you are back in grade school and you are sitting in your desk looking at the large blackboard at the front of the room. Now imagine your teacher reaching up, and instead of writing on the board, she takes her long fingernails and scratches all four nails firmly against the board, slowly from top to bottom.

Now, did you feel uncomfortable?

What’s amazing about it is you didn’t even hear the sound but I was activating your Mirror Neurons, you still had that feeling. This is the concept of Mirror Neurons. Now, through research, this is being used in the world of marketing.”

From “Why We Really Buy” on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Martin Lindstrom

I’m not sure the great direct response copywriters out there have any idea that there exists something called a “Mirror Neuron” but, once again, in application the direct marketers are way ahead of academics and the corporate world.  Any copywriter worth his salt knows that evoking a high emotional or physical response is good marketing.

I enjoyed this interview, but you can just sense the chasm between academics and the world of direct marketing when you listen to this one.  Still, I learned a lot about ‘Buyology.’

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Tip 1: Break expectations. Your audience will walk in with certain assumptions about your message. If you believe those assumptions are mistaken, you’ve got to confront them directly. Effective teachers do this well. Imagine an eighth-grade science class: “The earth feels pretty solid, right? But it turns out that the surface of the earth rides on large moving plates, and if we understand how they move, we can understand the shape of the continents on the globe and we can understand how mountains and volcanoes are formed.”

Tip 2: Create a “proverb.” We tend to look down on soundbites, thinking that “shortness” must mean oversimplification. But use proverbs as your inspiration. Proverbs are short phrases that carry profound meaning — think of the wisdom that is packed into a short sentence such as, “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.”

Tip 3: Be concrete. Being concrete helps people make decisions and take action. The Saddleback Church in California has defined a fictional couple, Saddleback Sam and Samantha, who embody the prototypical traits of the kind of community member that the church wants to reach. It’s easier for the members to plan outreach activities when they have “Sam and Samantha” in mind, as compared to a more abstract description, such as a “dual-income, upper middle-class, professional couple.”

Tip 4: Use stories. People will remember your stories, not your pontifications. Aesop’s Fables have endured for centuries, but Aesop’s Thesis Sentences wouldn’t have made it 10 minutes. Choose your stories carefully, so that after the fact, your audience can reconstruct your core meaning, just like we can do with “The Fox and the Grapes.”

Tip 5: Use an analogy. You can get across complex ideas quickly by making use of what people already know. That’s what analogies do — they create links between new ideas and ideas that people have already learned. Movies in Hollywood, for example, are pitched in terms of analogies to other movies. The movie that became Alien was pitched as “Jaws on a spaceship.” That pitch conveys a tremendous amount of information in four words.

Tip 6: Allow people to test for themselves. People love to try before they buy. The same is also true with your ideas. Give people a “test” that allows them to confirm, for themselves, whether your idea is credible. For instance, the Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” campaign depended on the customer’s ability to see that Wendy’s meat patties were larger than those of the competition.

Tip 7: Create a curiosity gap. Research says that we feel curious when there’s a gap between what we know and what we want to know. You should tease your audience with what they don’t know. For instance, think of how your local evening news programs promote themselves: “There’s a drug sweeping thru high schools — and it may be in your medicine cabinet!”

Tip 8: Focus on individuals, not the “big picture.” Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Many charities attract our support by focusing on specific human beings — “For $20 a month, you can sponsor Rokia, a 7-year-old girl, in Kenya” — rather than huge abstract causes, such as African poverty. This phenomenon works just as well in business contexts. Don’t talk about “improving customer service,” talk about how specific people should behave differently.

Tip 9: Use human-scale statistics. It is hard to make numbers stick, but when you must use statistics to boost your argument, make sure to frame them in a way that they can be understood. For instance, it’s hard to picture the scale of a $300 million government program. But it’s easier to picture the scale when you describe it as a program that spends about a dollar annually on every man, woman, and child in the United States.

Tip 10: Say 1 thing, not 5 things. A famous trial lawyer said, “If you say five things, you say nothing.” It’s vital that we strip down our idea to its core. A famous example of useful simplicity was the theme of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, written by James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Copyright © 2009 Chip and Dan Heath co-authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Author Bios Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He lives in Los Gatos, California.

Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, is a Consultant to the Policy Programs of the Aspen Institute. A former researcher at Harvard Business School, he is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an innovative new-media textbook company. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Don Morris asked me that today in the VisiOlo users forum.

I needed a good blog topic, so thanks Don.

Rob Toth and Jason Anderson also asked me the same thing and I hope other people are interested and curious enough to ask the same thing.

Hmmm. What does VisiOlo mean?

That is such a multidimensional question, the first answer to which is… nothing.

VisiOlo is a made up word.  But it was carefully chosen.

I wanted a word that could become a brand.

I wanted a word that:

• is at least neutral in most people’s minds
• stood out as unique, in the Infopreneur Tools niche
• engenders a bit of whimsy to balance the technical nature of “tracking and optimization”
• supports the key idea behind the tool: visible metrics
• was available as a .com URL
• wasn’t restrictive and could allow my project to grow beyond what I can conceive it to be now
• wouldn’t look ’stale’ in three years
• was no more than three syllables

After a LOT of brainstorming, mindmapping, whiteboarding, and discussions, I arrived at VisiOlo. I think it hits on *most* of my criteria — *enough* of my criteria. Because the brand *name* is only part of the story

But, VisiOlo still just a made up word

It is my mission to make it stand for something

That the “visi” part will make sense because VisiOlo gives you vision, it supports your vision, it makes the meaning behind your stats visible, it provides visual feedback about the effectiveness of your marketing system

That the “Olo” part will be just silly enough to make technology more comfortable for creative Infopreneurs

That “VisiOlo” will start to sound almost like the proclamation a master magician makes when he reveals his most impressive illusion — or what the French Maitre d’ says as he removes stainless cover from the main course.

We all have dreams for our brands, right?

But it’s the ‘doing’ that builds a brand.

Brands are not ‘crafted,’ they are grown.

A good name can provide fertile ground for the seeds customer satisfaction to grow into mighty forests.

But brand-farming is not glitzy work.

To grow a brand requires care and constant feeding.

In terms of VisiOlo we can envision the forest, but we have just barely begun to plant the seeds.

So, VisiOlo is a word-vessel waiting to be filled with meaning in the world of the Infopreneur.

What does your “word” mean?  I’d love to hear your comments.

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