First of all, I wanted to let you know that my workshop on creating compelling landing pages is now open for public enrolment.
This workshop is not just an online course. It is an interactive series of sessions where we will work together as a group to improve your landing page. I will also support you one-on-one to ensure your landing pages deliver better results.
If you want to enrol, but cannot secure budget, you will be pleased to hear that I am giving away one free place as part of the monthly rewards program prize draw. Encourage a friend to subscribe to this newsletter, and you will be automatically entered.
Anyway, moving on. What I actually want to talk about in this email is having “funnel vision”. I am sure you have heard the phrase “tunnel vision” where you end up with a narrow field of view.
Do You or Your Stakeholders Have Tunnel Vision?
Having tunnel vision in our jobs is one of the biggest dangers we can face and is the reason for so many of the disputes that happen between stakeholders. We are all so focused on our department, our roles and our disciplines, that we are blinkered to other people’s perspectives.
If you design user interfaces, then an interface is the answer to every problem. If you work in marketing, then marketing is crucial to organisational success. Our perspectives are all shaped by our biases.
I am no different. With my background in web design, I have always considered the website the most critical aspect of digital. But of course, things are not that simple.
How to Avoid Becoming Blinkered?
So how do we avoid having this blinkered perspective? How do we avoid having tunnel vision? We need to start fostering funnel vision instead.
Instead of focusing on our discipline, our team or our department, we need to be focusing on the funnel. Sales and marketing would refer to this as the sales funnel, while in UX design, we call it the customer journey.
However, in both cases, we are referring to the steps our audience passes through. That ranges from discovering a need for your product to eventually becoming a loyal advocate for your organisation.
Take a Step Back
We need to learn to take a step back from the particular project we are working on and look at the bigger picture.
What has the user experience been before they reached the current stage that you are trying to improve? What are you encouraging the user to do next and is that handover seamless?
Take a simple example. A user clicks on a Google Ad that takes them to a website, which in turn, encourages them to sign up to a newsletter. Do those three parts work together?
- Does the ad send people to the website homepage or a landing page specifically tailored to that ad?
- Does the landing page include an incentive to sign up to the newsletter? Is that incentive relevant to the audience the ad has targeted?
- Do the emails the user receives when they sign up build on the subject covered in the incentive and landing page?
It only needs one weak point in the chain, and the whole journey collapses.
So my question for you is who is looking after your overall customer experience? Who is improving the entire journey? Who ‘owns’ the customer?
Yes, I realise that most company structures divide up the experience between silos and that assigning the entire experience to one department is a hard sell. But it needs to happen.
Create a roll outside of organisational reporting lines or hire an independent outsider to help (you know where to find me!). Still, somebody has to own the customer and take responsibility for improving all parts of their journey.
Speak to you soon.
